Join us Thurs., June 22, 5 pm as New York Times reporter Gina Kolata discusses her new book Mercies in Disguise (St. Martin’s, hb., 272 pp., $26).
In Mercies in Disguise, Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an almost archetypal family in a small town in South Carolina. A proud and determined clan, many of them doctors, they are struck one by one with an inscrutable illness. They finally discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of events. Meanwhile, science, progressing for a half a century along a parallel track, had handed the Baxleys a resolution―not a cure, but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease and who did not. And science would offer another dilemma―fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children through an expensive process.
A work of narrative nonfiction, Mercies in Disguise is the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when the medical world abandoned them. It’s a story of a family that had to deal with unspeakable tragedy and yet did not allow it to tear them apart. And it is the story of a young woman―Amanda Baxley―who faced the future head on, determined to find a way to disrupt her family’s destiny.
Gina Kolata is a senior medical writer for the New York Times and the author of nine books and editor of three. She has won numerous prizes and was a Pulitzer finalist twice.
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