SOUTH AFRICA AUTHOR · FICTION · BIOGRAPHY
Christiaan Barnard
Also known as: Barnard Christiaan, Christian Barnard
Christiaan Neethling Barnard (8 November 1922 – 2 September 2001) was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first human-to-human heart transplant operation. On 3 December 1967, Barnard transplanted the heart of accident victim Denise Darvall into the chest of 54-year-old Louis Washkansky, who regained full consciousness and was able to talk easily with his wife, before dying 18 days later of pneumonia, largely brought on by the anti-rejection drugs that suppressed his immune system. Barnard had told Mr. and Mrs. Washkansky that the operation had an 80% chance of success, an assessment which has been criticised as misleading.
South Africa is one of the largest countries in Africa.
— from South Africa
Most acclaimed
Christiaan Barnard
1970
This book is the autobiography of the famed South African heart-transplanter. The novelistic (conversations recreated years after they took place), breathless prose disqualifies much of Barnard's story as good medical history, but its inherent drama will hold even the critical reader. - Annals of Internal Medicine.
Good life, good death
"For nearly four decades, Derek Humphry has blazed a trail for the right-to-die movement. He founded the Hemlock Society, pioneered Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, and wrote the bestselling books Final Exit (more than one million copies sold, and a New York Times bestseller for eighteen weeks) and Jean's Way (UK bestseller). But before his wife's terminal illness ravaged his life, Humphry was a successful journalist. In Good Life, Good Death , readers will learn how the twists and turns of fate led him to his life's purpose. In his poignant memoir, Derek tells of his broken family, his wartime experiences as a boy in England, and rising to the highest rungs of journalism on two continents. In 1975, he lived with crippling fear and sadness when his beloved wife, Jean, was diagnosed with cancer. As the disease gradually spread, they both decided that rather than let a terminal illness run its course through extreme physical and emotional pain, Jean would end her own life on her own terms, at an agreed upon time and manner, arranging her own last days. Readers will witness the personal pain and emotional distress they endured, as well as the legal repercussions Derek faced following her death."--Dust jacket.
One life
1998
Destined for attention, this complete biography of Wendell Willkie is an experimental book, adding to Muriel Rukeyser's biographical work on Willard Gibbs and to her growth and stature as more than an important American poet. In reality this book about Willkie is a poem, dynamic as was the man and its images equate his character, actions and thoughts with a forceful accuracy, becoming the nearest thing possible to the man, himself. Throughout the book we are told very little. We are presented rather with the actuality of what he saw: ""....through the dream corn, chieftains gathering, closing in...."" or was saying: ""...They talk about flood control. .... But what are they marketing? Political power....they are...underselling the utility companies, and letting you- the taxpayer- make up the loss"". It is a book of impressions but impressions so arranged- in passages from political transcripts and newspapers, from Willkie's own writings and the statements of others about him, and from Miss Rukeyser's poems using these as a background- that they add up to more than the mere reporting of fact. Though they are not explained in so many words one comes to understand the important issues of the New Deal era, the battle of a man who fought the accumulation of power and who lived, during a short, full life, to see a unique aftermath of his defeat for the presidency. As a fully researched study which at the same time recreates its subject in imaginative from this sets new precedents in American writing.