Send in a review of The Match: Complete Strangers, A Miracle Transplant, Two Lives Transformed and an excerpt from your review will be on display at Harvard Medical School’s Joseph Martin Center this November 10.
Your name, city of origin and picture, if you so choose, will be on predominant display for guests to read as they celebrate the official Boston book launch at Harvard during our gala fundraiser celebrating Team Heart Rwanda. Susan will also send you a personally autographed copy of “The Match” if you are one of the first 10 reviewers to respond.
All reviews must be limited to 350 words and received no later than Monday, November 8 at 12 noon, EST. Have some fun. Always wanted to write a review that would put the New York Times Book Review Section to shame? Now is your chance!
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Joseph Helfgot, the son of Holocaust survivors, worked his way from a Lower East Side tenement to create a successful Hollywood research company. But his heart was failing. After months of waiting for a heart transplant, he died during the operation.
ReplyDeleteHours after his death, his wife Susan was asked a shocking question: would she donate her husband's face to a total stranger?
The stranger was James Maki, the adopted son of parents who spent part of World War II in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Rebelling against his stern father, a professor, by enlisting to serve in Vietnam, he returned home a broken man, addicted to drugs. One night he fell facedown onto the electrified third rail of a Boston subway track.
A young Czech surgeon who was determined to make a better life on the other side of the Iron Curtain was on call when the ambulance brought Maki to the hospital. Although Dr. Bohdan Pomahac gave him little chance of survival, Maki battled back. He was sober and grateful for a second chance, but he became a recluse, a man without a face. His only hope was a controversial face transplant, and Dr. Pomahac made it happen.
In The Match, Susan Whitman Helfgot captures decades of drama and history, taking us from Warsaw to Japan, from New York to Hollywood. Through wars and immigration, poverty and persecution, from a medieval cadaver dissection to a stunning seventeen-hour face transplant, she weaves together the story of people forever intertwined—a triumphant legacy of hope.