Jack El-Hai ’79 featured by Star Tribune for new book about Mayo Clinic’s first-ever face transplant
El-Hai studied English at Carleton.
Jack El-Hai ’79 was featured by The Star Tribune in a piece titled, “Minneapolis writer Jack El-Hai tackles the story of Mayo’s first face transplant.”
On May 21, from 1–2 p.m., El-Hai will host a Carleton Connects event on “how to tell stories and make movies.”
To give an idea of the scope and difficulty of Jack El-Hai’s new book: He usually does three or four revisions. This one was more like 10 or 12.
“It was a hard book to write,” said El-Hai of “Face in the Mirror,” which covers nearly 20 years — from 2006, when a Wyoming man named Andy Sandness shot himself in the head and immediately regretted it, to today, when he’s a Minnesota resident and the recipient (in 2016) of the first-ever face transplant at Mayo Clinic.
The difficulty had to do with the many folks who needed to be happy with the book. It’s not just El-Hai and his readers, the people he has aimed to please with previous works such as “The Lobotomist” and “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist.” It’s also the clinic, which commissioned the book, medical professionals who were part of the historic operation, Sandness and Dr. Samir Mardini, who led the surgical team and was eager to have his most important work documented.