About this item
Joseph Helfgot, the son of Holocaust survivors, worked his way from a Lower East Side tenement to create a successful Hollywood research company. But his heart was failing. After months of waiting for a heart transplant, he died during the operation. Hours after his death, his wife Susan was asked a shocking question: would she donate her husband's face to a total stranger? The stranger was James Maki, the adopted son of parents who spent part of World War II in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. Rebelling against his stern father, a professor, by enlisting to serve in Vietnam, he returned home a broken man, addicted to drugs. One night he fell facedown onto the electrified third rail of a Boston subway track. A young Czech surgeon who was determined to make a better life on the other side of the Iron Curtain was on call when the ambulance brought Maki to the hospital.
About the Author
Susan Whitman Helfgot is the widow of Joseph Helfgot, a movie marketer who died receiving a heart transplant in April of 2009. Susan was cast into the national spotlight when a Boston Globe reporter accidentally learned that she had donated her husband's face in a historic transplant operation.A decade earlier, a passion for astronomy lured the former financial industry executive back to college. Susan became a co-founder and board member of a charter middle school in Los Angeles before returning to Boston with her family in 2002. She pursued degrees in biology and teaching while caring for her terminally ill mother and ailing husband.A science background coupled with years as a caregiver and hospital insider give Susan a unique perspective on the people and medicine behind organ transplantation. A lecturer at medical conferences, she has testified before the Massachusetts legislature and appeared on Doctor Oz and Good Morning America. She serves as trustee of the Joseph Helfgot Foundation, created to advance medical research, education and clinical care. An avid runner and stargazer, Susan lives with her children and cocker spaniel in a suburb of Boston.
