Word: deford
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...international antiques business. When these books succeed in evoking an environment or ethos, the reader can more readily forgive any lack of suspense or ingenuity in the plot. Sometimes the writer depends on heavy research or personal knowledge: Tennis Star Ilie Nastase and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Writer Frank Deford both published thrillers this year set on the international tennis circuit, and retired Quarterback Fran Tarkenton collaborated on a pro- football mystery. On occasion, the voyage into another world may be largely imaginary: H.R.F. Keating launched his delightful and convincing comic series about Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police -- the latest...
NONFICTION: Alex, the Life of a Child, Frank Deford -The Caravaggio Conspiracy, Peter Watson Characters and Their Landscapes, Ronald Blythe -The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin - Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, Phyllis Rose -A Warsaw Diary: 1978-81, Kazimierz Brandys
...doctors discovered that the pale and distressingly listless baby had CF. The disease strikes one in 1,000 children, is always fatal, but ravages its victims first. Girls suffer more than boys and die at a faster rate. To prolong Alex's life, Deford and his wife Carol daily had to hold her upside down and pound her chest and back to loosen the life-threatening mucus in her lungs. "Two thousand times I had to beat my sick child," her father recalls, "make her hurt and cry and plead - 'No, not the down ones, Daddy...
After Alex and her father had laughed at a joke, the girl climbed into his lap and said, "Oh, Daddy, wouldn't this have been great?" writes Deford. "After we had hugged each other, she left the room, because, I knew, she wanted to let me cry alone." At the end of her last stay at Yale-New Haven Hospital, when her ordeal with CF had been compounded by arthritis, pneumonia and collapsing lungs, Alex said to a nurse, "I'm going home to die now, but don't you tell my Mommy or Daddy because...
While guilt-ridden parents, who unwittingly carry the disease, divorce at several times the national average because of CF's agonies, Deford and his wife preserved their marriage with an unspoken agreement that both would not cry at the same time. After Alex died in his arms, Deford's guilt turned to futile anger and finally to a transforming admiration for his courageous daughter. "It frightens me most," he concludes, "that I will meet some great test in my life - maybe one for my life, as she did - and I will not be able to do as well...