Summary:

The novel follows, in a roughly temporal manner with flashbacks, the evolution of the illness of a child afflicted with promyelocytic leukemia and her family's attempt to save her. At core is the issue of conceiving a child with the hope that she (Anna) will be able to provide what her older, ill sister (Kate) needs to survive. The initial need is met by cord blood transfusion, however, as time passes, Kate relapses, and technology makes new demands on the obligatory donor.

Eventually Anna, at age 13, requests emancipation from the health care control of her beleaguered parents. The reader is introduced to the dilemma as the adolescent donor seeks legal help. Over the course of the novel, which is structured with a revolving first person viewpoint, the reader becomes acquainted with the personal perspectives of many characters, but with no warning of the ultimate outcome of the family drama.

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This is the story of a child/young adult who had the misfortune of multiple health problems from the age of three until his death at 19. But even more than Jesse's story, this is the narrative of and by Jesse's father as he recalls the emotional rollercoaster accompanying the abbreviated span of his oldest son's life. The author kept detailed journals of his and his son's experiences with the health care professions, while also collecting the boy's artwork which appears to be Jesse's personal record of his own internal struggle.

Although not chronologically linear, the narrative allows the reader into the soul of the parents' agony, from the time of Jesse's initial diagnosis of hydrocephalus, through management of inflammatory bowel disease, and into the final chronicle of unsuccessful liver transplantations.

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In this study of a small group of children followed by an HIV clinic at an unidentified institution, the author describes in detail her experience with the children, their caregivers--sometimes biological family members, sometimes foster providers--and the medical staff responsible for the management of their viral infection. The writer, a humanities professor at a medical school, acknowledges the privilege she felt at having been in a position to develop a close personal contact over several years with the people about whom she writes.

The frame of the study is case-oriented. Each child is described and the medical and social histories of a total of nine are outlined and then fleshed out with personal interviews and home visits made by the writer. In addition to the histories, Hawkins includes a glossary of contemporary medical terms and common acronyms relevant to HIV, a bibliography, and a list of resources for those interested in looking further into this infection as it presents in children.

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Written by a Jungian psychoanalyst about her own experience with metastatic breast cancer, this memoir is a two year chronicle extending from the day of diagnosis through sequential remissions and relapse, to the remission following stem cell transplant. In the course of this voyage, the author deals with her own fear and anger, the range of responses elicited from family and friends, and her anxiety about the technology and impersonality of the health care system.

The book ends, but Middlebrook's story does not. She is feeling well as she recovers from her transplant. She knows she still has a lethal tumor. The only thing she doesn't know is when it will claim her life.

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The story opens two years into the writer's undiagnosed hematological disorder, focusing the narrative on the two most significant issues in this young woman's life--her first experience with a love relationship that is to result in a long-term commitment, and the disease that for years is to affect the way she lives her day-to-day life. Breslin describes in considerable detail her encounters with hospitals and health care professionals, none of whom are able to diagnosis nor prognosticate but continue to treat each new symptom as it arises.

In the midst of this uncertainty which pervades the memoir, are the subtexts of the love between the author and her husband and the relationship she maintains with her father. The reader, presumably like the author herself, never learns the name of the mysterious illness that informs the tale.

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This little volume of poetry and photos is a narrative of the life and death of a small boy with leukemia and the connection this creates with his mother, his father, and his stepfather. The poems are created by the child’s mother (the author) during the illness and after the death of her son in his early childhood; photos are done by the author’s brother. The author creates the scenario in her brief introduction to the collection of poems and photos.

In a stuttering fashion, the reader is guided through mother’s grief as she holds her son through multiple chemotherapy sessions, reevaluations, disappointments, and finally, the terminal events. The entire poetic experience is calmly reflective, but the deep grief of mother bubbles to the surface--in a controlled manner that makes the reader feel her pain, and also accept her acceptance.

The poems themselves are compelling in their simplicity: after Sam dies, the author writes, of a note of condolence received by a friend, "Now that I have a child of my own, / a friend writes, "I understand your loss." / "No," I think, "now you understand / what I had."

The author, as she adapts to the absence of her firstborn, has a second son. She reflects on the joy that she feels, but the impossibility of replacing a first love. The event of Sam’s death is so ethereal that it cannot be dated. It is a universal experience for those left behind. And Hutner leaves the reader with this sense of timelessness with her poetry, and with her own death from breast cancer in 2002.

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Piercy writes painfully and poignantly about the silent and slow death(s) from radiation exposure. In this nine stanza catalogue, she parades the incidents known or suspected to be the source of clusters of disease, disability and demise related to ignorant or irresponsible exposure of humans to nuclear testing and nuclear installations. She juxtaposes the beauties of nature, "The soft spring rain . . . " and the secret poisons with which man has contaminated her, ". . . blowing from the irradiated cloud." And, finally, she muses on the fact that we simply accept our symptoms instead of confronting our murderers.

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This is a series of vignettes involving a small cluster of patients in an early twentieth century tuberculosis sanatorium located in Scotland. The stories are narrated by one of the patients who makes observations and predictions about his peers in the institution. The lives Maugham chooses to have narrated are those of two men, long-term residents, whose daily entertainment is to irritate one another. There is a mixture of humor and pathos in the dialogue between these two. The second story within a story is that of the developing love between a dying man and a moderately ill woman--and the decision they ultimately make about the importance of their relationship in the face of the man’s impending death.

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It was during a trip to Paris in 1985 to accept a prestigious writing award that William Styron first realized that the melancholy which had been descending upon him for months was part of the onset of a crippling depression. In this brief book, Styron describes his own experience and eventual recovery, and touches upon the history and clinical aspects of depression as he talks about the many writers who have also been afflicted with this disease.

Styron gives both a retrospective account of the beginnings of his illness, and details his own theories (his abrupt intolerance for alcohol, a possible family history, characters in his early writings in whom he described symptoms strikingly similar to those he would develop himself years later) about the origins of his depression.

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This is the wrenching history of the development, evolution, and eventual obsolescence of the leper colony established in 1866 on the isolated and only sometimes accessible peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai--and the lives of the people who were exiled there to die over a period of more than 100 years. The tale opens with the declaration by the Board of Health that all persons proven (or strongly suggested) to be afflicted with leprosy be exiled immediately to the site on Molokai.

The author dramatically describes the selection and separation of the exiles from their families and the tortuous and sometimes deadly sea voyage to their primitive new homeland. Mixed with the public policy and the individuals who made and implemented it, are the descriptions of the hospital in Honolulu where diagnoses and dispositions were rendered, as well as the poignant personal stories of the "detainees." The reader follows the colony from the arrival of its first 13 patients in 1866, through its peak population of 1,144, to its residual 28 in 2003.

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