<![CDATA[Fragile Innocence: A Father's Memoir of His Daughter's Courageous Journey]]>

false <![CDATA[Fragile Innocence: A Father's Memoir of His Daughter's Courageous Journey]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175804029m/561068.jpg 561068 2 Fragile Innocence is the story of a child devastated by pure chance. This moving narrative of a father’s journey to understand and accept the profound changes in his daughter’s life is at once memoir, biography, mystery, and drama, all centered around one remarkable young woman who cannot talk or read or understand language, but who has touched almost everyone she has ever met. At eighteen months Hillary Reston, a happy, healthy toddler, was struck by a remarkably high fever. On the advice of her doctor, her parents, James Reston, Jr., and Denise Leary, administered Tylenol and anxiously waited for the fever to subside. Five days later it did, but the damage was done. Over the course of the next five months their bubbly, highly verbal child was radically and irrevocably changed. Worse yet, no doctor could explain what evil and still unidentified force had stolen Hillary’s ability to speak or understand language, hurtled her into a seemingly endless cycle of seizures, destroyed her kidneys, and taken her to the very brink of death. For her parents, discovering what had happened to their child and how to assure the quality of her life became an obsession. This quest for answers would take them from the nation’s hospitals to the office of a pioneering geneticist in Texas and the vaulted halls of the National Institutes of Health. This very intimate story also personalizes some of the most daunting ethical issues of medicine that society faces today, including stem cell research, animal organ transplantation, diagnosis with the Human Genome Map, and reproductive and therapeutic cloning. Hillary gives these immensely complicated issues a human face, and they are pondered by Reston as a reporter, a thinker, and a father. In Fragile Innocence author James Reston, Jr., invites us inside his family, candidly sharing the joys and sorrows of raising Hillary. “This is a book about the first twenty-one years of a child named Hillary. It tells of her battle to live and our family’s struggle to help her survive as best we could, after an evil and still unidentified force robbed her of her language at the age of two, hurtled her into a seemingly endless cycle of brain storms, destroyed her kidneys, and took her to the very brink of death. That is the first half of the story, when life itself was at stake.” —From the Preface From the Hardcover edition. 1458407 2006 Fragile Innocence: A Father's Memoir of His Daughter's Courageous Journey total:19|5:4|4:6|3:7|2:2|1:0| 19 69 33 4 4 0 false false Sun May 04 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri Dec 28 15:14:55 -0800 2007 Tue May 06 09:44:27 -0700 2008 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2006 Sat Dec 27 14:29:30 -0800 2008 Sat Dec 27 14:30:29 -0800 2008 0 0 false false Mon Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Feb 22 06:22:41 -0800 2009 Sun Feb 22 06:24:23 -0800 2009 3 0 false false Mon Jul 14 20:20:55 -0700 2008 Thu Nov 20 13:05:40 -0800 2008 1 5 0 false false Wed Oct 14 08:26:32 -0700 2009 Wed Oct 14 08:26:32 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Sun Aug 09 14:37:39 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 09 14:37:39 -0700 2009 2 0 false false Thu Jul 02 21:43:06 -0700 2009 Thu Jul 02 21:43:06 -0700 2009 3 0 false false Thu Jun 04 15:00:12 -0700 2009 Thu Jun 04 15:00:12 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Tue May 19 08:30:52 -0700 2009 Tue May 19 08:30:52 -0700 2009 0 0 false false Sat Apr 18 11:33:55 -0700 2009 Sat Apr 18 11:33:55 -0700 2009 4 0 false false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed Feb 11 09:28:28 -0800 2009 Wed Feb 11 09:29:02 -0800 2009 0 0 false false Sun Jun 10 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sat Dec 27 20:35:43 -0800 2008 Sun Jan 04 12:47:13 -0800 2009 4 0 false false Tue Dec 16 11:43:05 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 16 11:43:05 -0800 2008 4 0 false false Thu Dec 11 19:28:56 -0800 2008 Tue Apr 21 15:32:12 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Tue Aug 26 17:06:53 -0700 2008 Tue Aug 26 17:06:53 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Fri Jul 04 16:15:39 -0700 2008 Fri Jul 04 16:15:39 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Wed May 14 12:59:42 -0700 2008 Wed May 14 12:59:47 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Tue May 06 10:03:43 -0700 2008 Tue May 06 10:03:50 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Thu May 01 06:23:48 -0700 2008 Thu May 01 06:23:57 -0700 2008 3 0 false false Wed Apr 30 19:24:38 -0700 2008 Wed Apr 30 19:24:38 -0700 2008 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=561068