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Dancing with Angels: a Transplant Odyssey
This is a one of a kind book that will take you thru the world of transplantation/organ donation or the path of catastrophic illness. How do you prepare? What do you need to know? What donor families and other transplants tell about their experiences...
482 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2008
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July 10, 2017
In what may be called “Organ Donation/Transplant 101” this collection of sisty-six stories and articles by almost as large a variety of authors, makes for challenging reading. Almost 400 pages in length with small font to fit all that material in even that many pages, the reading can be tough on the eyes, but even tougher in the variety of writing styles across so many authors. There appears to be little in the way of editing, so each writer’s style remains in tact, some more polished than others, but that gives the reader some sense of each personal true-life experience.
Divided into two large sections, the first 200 pages is dedicated to recipients, donors and caregivers’ stories. A second section goes on to provide facts and views from many medical professionals’ views of the process. I found issue with some of those views and wonder if what is offered as fact is indeed verified and reviewed fact, so a word of caution in reading everything offered here as being absolute. Author Pratt’s work is certainly daunting and she does collect a remarkable cross section of everything related to donation and transplant with seemingly nothing left untouched, even if treated at various levels of depth given individual authors’ writings uniqueness and differing perceptions from their unique roles. These writings certainly serve at least as an introduction to these many and varied topics, from which the reader can certainly research further before basing any decisions on the information offered here.
The variety is disconnected in topic, which while not a distraction in the life stories of the first section, does cause some reader disconnect in going from one topic to the next in the second sections’ articles. While not required reading for medical professionals working in the field, anyone facing the challenges of transplant for the first time will certainly find lots to interest them in this encyclopedic approach to the overall subject field.
A final one page Epilogue serves to just randomly list a long series of vignettes of facts about the subject, which along with the final page offering a table titled “Financial Impact of Transplant” (describing costs for each type of organ transplant, current as of July 2004) would be better served if it offered reference information to enable the reader to find more detail or in the case of that table, more current cost information.
see this and more than a hundred other organ donation/transplant related books - many with my personal reviews - at http://www.trioweb.org/resources/book...
Divided into two large sections, the first 200 pages is dedicated to recipients, donors and caregivers’ stories. A second section goes on to provide facts and views from many medical professionals’ views of the process. I found issue with some of those views and wonder if what is offered as fact is indeed verified and reviewed fact, so a word of caution in reading everything offered here as being absolute. Author Pratt’s work is certainly daunting and she does collect a remarkable cross section of everything related to donation and transplant with seemingly nothing left untouched, even if treated at various levels of depth given individual authors’ writings uniqueness and differing perceptions from their unique roles. These writings certainly serve at least as an introduction to these many and varied topics, from which the reader can certainly research further before basing any decisions on the information offered here.
The variety is disconnected in topic, which while not a distraction in the life stories of the first section, does cause some reader disconnect in going from one topic to the next in the second sections’ articles. While not required reading for medical professionals working in the field, anyone facing the challenges of transplant for the first time will certainly find lots to interest them in this encyclopedic approach to the overall subject field.
A final one page Epilogue serves to just randomly list a long series of vignettes of facts about the subject, which along with the final page offering a table titled “Financial Impact of Transplant” (describing costs for each type of organ transplant, current as of July 2004) would be better served if it offered reference information to enable the reader to find more detail or in the case of that table, more current cost information.
see this and more than a hundred other organ donation/transplant related books - many with my personal reviews - at http://www.trioweb.org/resources/book...
Displaying 1 of 1 review