cover image The Match: Complete Strangers, A Miracle Face Transplant, Two Lives Transformed

The Match: Complete Strangers, A Miracle Face Transplant, Two Lives Transformed

Susan Whitman Helfgot, with William Novak. Simon & Schuster, $26 (264p) ISBN 9781439195482

When Helfgot's husband, Joseph, the son of Holocaust survivors, died from complications after a heart transplant, she chose to donate his face to James Maki, a mixed Blackfoot Indian and Japanese orphan. Maki was also a Vietnam veteran who had struggled with drug addiction after the war and had lost his face after falling onto subway tracks. He'd undergone a number of operations and was living in a halfway house on Boston's North Shore. With the help of veteran collaborator Novak, who aided in the autobiographies of Nancy Reagan and Magic Johnson, Helfgot shares her journey to this history-making operation and its aftermath, along the way relaying the dramatic differences between these two men whose lives would be intertwined forever. Written in the third person and clogged with medical jargon, the story can feel impersonal at times, but it's still more compelling than most fiction, and demonstrates how compassionate doctors and technology can combine to make medical miracles. (Oct.)