Immortal Bird
A Family Memoir
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4.2 • 25 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A searing account of a father’s struggle to save his remarkable son from a rare heart condition that threatens his life—“a powerful and lyric portrait of a son and a vibrant family” (Toni Morrison).
Damon Weber is a brilliant kid—a skilled actor and a natural leader at school. Born with a congenital heart defect that required surgery when he was a baby, Damon’s spirit and independence have always been a source of pride to his parents, who vigilantly look for any signs of danger.
Unbowed by frequent medical checkups, Damon proves to be a talent on stage, appears in David Milch’s HBO series Deadwood, and maintains an active social life, whenever he has the energy. But running through Damon’s coming-of-age in the shadow of affliction is another story: his father Doron’s relentless search for answers in a race against time.
Immortal Bird is a stirring, gorgeously written memoir of a father’s fight to save his son’s life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A father celebrates his son's life while trying desperately to save it in this luminous character study cum medical odyssey. Weber recounts his teenage son Damon's battle with enteropathy, a usually fatal disorder, linked to a congenital heart defect, that starves the body of protein. Weber threw himself into researching and managing his son's ailment, but nothing stopped the progressive debilitation and wasting; finally Damon received a heart transplant that brought new disasters in its wake. Weber's detailed, harrowing narrative of Damon's struggle is in part an indictment of modern medicine, which he depicts as a combination of miraculous technology with dangerously flawed basic caregiving; his furious accusations of substandard practice at New York's prestigious Columbia Presbyterian Hospital erroneous prescriptions, botched diagnoses, slipshod nursing, callous doctoring, "drive-by exams" will raise eyebrows. But Weber reserves most of his energy for a tender, clear-eyed profile of his son. Small, sickly, but charismatic and a natural actor, Damon cunningly conceals his physical weaknesses while extracting every ounce of happiness from his straitened circumstances; even as he fades, this kid seems to own every room he enters. Weber's heartbreaking story gives us both a tragic cautionary tale and a moving account.
Customer Reviews
Regretable read
Outwardly biased. No gratitude, only grief. Single dimensional processing. A doctor's worst nightmare.
Immortal Bird - The Story of a Father's rage, hatred, and narcissism
What should have been a story of a brave, chronically ill young man with very severe congenital heart disease becomes the story of an angry father who casts himself as a victim in a very difficult, nearly impossible medical situation. He describes himself as a father devoted to protecting his son against a medical system that has kept his son, born with a lethal medical condition, relatively healthy for more than a decade. When he "protects" his son, he actually tries to take over the son's medical management, and therefore endangers him further.
Furthermore, he portrays his son as a saint and himself the perfect father. No one is a saint or a perfect parent, and the story would have more sympathetic if he had told a nuanced story.
He is a poor writer - he used the thesaurus in the word processor extensively. The book needed a good editor to pare down the story to its important essentials.
I also noticed that it was the female physicians who he singled out for particularly severe condemnation.
I wanted to hear the story of a son and family dealing with the tragedy of a severely ill child, but instead got the story of a self-centered father.