Life Savers: The Story of 8,000 Perfect Strangers

For readers who loved Rob Delaney’s A Heart That Works, a mother’s tender, inspirational memoir of her brave little boy’s battle with leukemia—and the generous strangers who rallied around him to try to save his life.

Spunky six-year-old Alex just wanted to be a normal kid. But in the spring of 1989, when the leukemia he’d been fighting off for a year returned with a vengeance, his Stanford doctors were clear: His only chance of survival was to find a perfectly matched bone marrow donor—and fast.

This is not only the story of a little boy in need. It is the story of what happens when ordinary people step forward. During one extraordinary summer, a kindhearted group of perfect strangers—including SF Giants pitcher Dave Dravecky, philanthropist Leonard Lauder, and Life-Savers Foundation of America founder Rudi Brutoco—helped launch the largest bone marrow donor drive in history. Though no match was found in time to help Alex, more than 8,000 names were added to the national bone marrow registry in just a few months, saving at least twenty other lives that year alone.

An intimate and unflinching medical memoir about a mother clinging to hope, a child facing the unimaginable, and a community awakened to compassion, Life Savers is a tender celebration of Alex’s legacy—the quiet, fierce beauty of the human heart when it shows the full strength of its generosity and love.