PanThe Irish Times (IRE)The cultural thread of transplant is measured in quacks, innovators and medical somersaults, told through the voice of a historian handling dense levels of research ... The themes of erasure and experimentation thread through the book, and the discomfort of the arrangement probes an awareness in the reader ... We arrive again at the mechanical language of the book’s opening scene that privileges the scientific over the tender, the medical detail over the man experiencing the moment ... I wonder if the stiffness of the material is merely a consequence of available information. However, the biography reveals something more heart-based ... The narrative stays alert to the intricacies of churning blood and the meat-like consistency of organs, but it fails to slow down and reimagine the emotional context for donor and recipient ... The summary thoughts of the writer in the final chapter could have served as a structural engine had they arrived much earlier. The book raises questions about how we relate to one another, what stories we choose to privilege and who gets to tell them. It doesn’t unpack the emotional ways we deal with and survive the very thing Craddock has charted: transplant ... Without this, the prose remains medicalised, and the marvellous breadth of the book is suffocated by its tone. The opportunity of being alive and present and accountable to one another, the miracle and monstrosity created, means more space and a slower, thoughtful consideration is needed ... It is the tenderness with which Craddock connects to this image that would have benefited the text itself.
Ruth Coker Burks and Kevin Carr O'Leary
PositiveThe Irish TimesThe origin story of the protagonist, dramatic on its own, is mentioned as an aside to the vignettes about the lives of the men she helps. It provides a powerful backstory. Her mother, a former nurse, was placed in a TB sanatorium when she was a child. She didn’t have TB but a rare lung disease. Medical misdiagnosis and mistreatment are part of the family history, and so too is caretaking. The first-person narrative offers the reader moments of shared epiphany ... The unflappable nature of her resilience against the shifting historical context is stunning to witness. Her co-writer, Kevin Carr O’Leary, helps shape this hero narrative well.Any drag queen worth her words will admire Coker Burks’s southern sass as an art form. The dialogue is cutting and exact ... All the Young Men could be categorised in many ways: it’s one woman’s relentless mission to help a community survive when those in power abandoned them. It’s the tale of people with Aids who returned to Arkansas during the first years of the epidemic. It’s also the story of a Christian woman who would go on to advise the Clinton administration on Aids education.
