Borrowing Life, Shelley Fraser Mickle
Borrowing Life, Shelley Fraser Mickle
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Borrowing Life
How Scientists, Surgeons, and a War Hero Made the First Successful Organ Transplant a Reality

Author: Shelley Fraser Mickle

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 7 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/14/2020


Synopsis

Against a global backdrop of wartime suffering and postwar hope, Borrowing Life gathers the personal histories of the men and women behind the team that enabled and performed the modern medical miracle of the world's first successful organ transplant.

Performed at Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1954, the first successful kidney transplant was the culmination of years of grit, compassion, and the pursuit of excellence by a remarkable medical team—Nobel Prize-winning surgeon Joseph Murray, his boss and fellow surgeon Francis Moore, and British scientist and fellow Nobel laureate Peter Medawar. Drawing on the lives of these members of the Greatest Generation, Borrowing Life creates a compelling narrative that begins in wartime and tracks decades of the ups and downs, personal and professional, of these inspiring men and their achievements, which continue to benefit humankind in so many ways.

About Shelley Fraser Mickle

Shelley Fraser Mickle is an award-winning novelist whose first novel, The Queen of October, was a New York Times Notable Book and selected by Library Journal as one of the ten best adult books suitable for young adults. Her novel Replacing Dad won an America's Writers Award in Chicago and was adapted for film. Her nonfiction book for middle-grade readers, Barbaro, America's Horse, won a Bank Street Award, and American Pharaoh, Triple Crown Champion, was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the best nonfiction books for children in 2017. From 2000 to 2006 she was a commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Her husband trained under the Brigham surgeons who are the focus of Borrowing Life.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Biblio on February 07, 2021

During and after WWII the science of transplanting made huge progress. Shelley Mickle follows several of the people who were making that progress possible: a medical scientist, a surgeon, and a patient. Skin grafts were front and center in the breakthroughs regarding the difficulties of transplant s......more

Goodreads review by jessica on March 13, 2025

3.5 ⭐️......more

Goodreads review by Debra on March 22, 2020

I knew close to nothing about the first organ transplant before reading this. I would have guessed a general timeline of the first transplant, but beyond that... this was all new and very interesting material! I love this kind of book because there is so much to learn and think about. The author does......more

Goodreads review by Cheryl on January 08, 2023

A very accessible and informative book about what went in to the miracle of organ transplantation. My mother had a kidney transplant in 2010 and it was a great help to her, although a little scary in our family. This book had been sitting on my shelf for several months when my older sister went onto......more

Goodreads review by Rick on May 11, 2020

An object lesson for today's crisis I am a restless reader who usually prefers the pace and energy of fiction to reading history or biography. So when my wife recommended Borrowing Life, I opened it hesitantly. It took only the first few pages, though, to hook me. This is a tale of medical innovation......more