For us oldsters, the first thing that enters our minds whenever we see anything written by James Reston, Jr., is that he is the son of the late, legendary New York Times reporter James Reston. Hardly fair treatment to afford the author of 13 books, three plays, and magazine articles by the boatload. I say that apropos probably of nothing, except that even though I have not known either Reston pere or Reston mere, somehow this intensely personal story touched me more than if I had never heard the family name.

I read Fragile Innocence: A Father's Memoir of His Daughter's Courageous Journey in fits and starts, just as I did with For Laci, Sharon Rocha's powerful tribute to her daughter Laci Peterson and her unborn grandson, Conner. I read these books while waiting in airports, between catnaps on the plane, while waiting for the serpentine belts to be replaced on my son's ancient car, during the 10 minutes I had before the adult Sunday School class that I lead began, while stuck in traffic, and while swaying back and forth on a front yard rocker swing.

Now, granted, I hate to waste time, but it wasn't until I finished Reston's memoir that I understood the real reason I did not just sit down and read either of these books for any length of time. Both struck extremely sensitive nerves.

About Laci and Conner, I need not belabor the obvious. It is difficult to imagine any action more heinous than a husband murdering his soon-to-deliver wife and unborn son. That he dumped their bodies in a bay, like so much refuse, only added to the horror.

In the case of Hillary Reston, she was surrounded by abiding love, not mindless hate, a gift from her father, mother, and two older siblings, as well as a small army of family friends, "doctors and caretakers, teachers and admirers."

In broadest strokes Hillary's story is easy to summarize. But to briefly convey its depth of feeling and lessons to be learned is another, far more difficult task.

In 1983, at 18 months of age, the already talkative Hillary ran a very high temperature for five days. As a father, I smiled in recognition as doctors provided words of reassurance to Reston and his lawyer wife Denise Leary: nothing is wrong, give her some Tylenol. In most cases, utterly responsible advice.

Seemingly recovered, it was not until later they discovered that "a secret, aggressive, evil seed had planted itself in her brain, and as each day of innocuous aspirins and cool baths passed without it being discovered and isolated, it wrought havoc."

Within a few weeks, Hillary took the first steps in what would be a precipitous medical decline. It began with flying leaps into the center of a steep-stepped Jacuzzi (earning her the nickname "Fearless Fosdick") and then spells in which she would stare blankly.

Then, one day Hillary appeared "in the doorway shaking violently, crying out, as her eyes rolled up in her head, and she dropped to the floor. There, her body stiffened and she shook grotesquely, her limbs askew and akimbo." It was to be the first in a seemingly endless series of convulsions which came ever and ever closer together. Then, Hillary lost her 200-word vocabulary, word by word. In a family that loves the printed and spoken word, this was utterly devastating.

Much of Fragile Innocence is given over to the mundane but bewilderingly complex and demanding task of caring for (and keeping safe) a severely cognitively damaged young child, on the one hand, and what borders on an obsession with discovering what "caused" all this, on the other. In over 20 years of research, they never were able to pin down a cause or a genetic "mistake."

The aggressive treatment to curb Hillary's violent convulsions took its toll on her kidneys. Eventually, she was on dialysis, adding enough layer of complexity to an already formidable regimen.

The demands on the family, as you can imagine, were immense. But, as more than one reviewer has noted, they are fighters. Understandable self-pity is replaced by a ferocious determination to assure that Hillary is not shunted aside, treated as a lesser human or, worst of all, "allowed" to die in one of her many medical emergencies.

It's not just the ignorance of strangers in the presence of Hillary's unpredictable behavior that hurt. Reston's father suggested Hillary be put in an institution. When they almost lost her, an attending doctor blurted out, "Perhaps it would be for the best. You could get on with your life."

The irony is, as Reston notes, "the doctor spoke the words from a wheelchair for he was himself handicapped." His wife turned on the doctor with "her full fury" and just before throwing him off the case said, "If you ever, ever get close to my daughter again I will haunt you for the rest of your life."

To give the book an edge of controversy, the publisher uses the dust jacket to highlight that while the family waited for a donor kidney (seemingly for an eternity), Reston was investigating "the most daunting ethical issues of medicine that society faces today, including stem cell research, animal organ transplantation, diagnosis with the Human Genome Map, and reproductive and therapeutic cloning." (Hillary eventually did get a kidney, from a star athlete who died in a motocross race at the Iowa County Fair. In many ways this is the strongest section of the book.)

By far the most fascinating part of this phase of the book is how the allure of "miracle cures" can turn the most linear mind into mush. Consider that Reston proudly writes of Hillary's individuality, her keen memory, and her iron will.

"Whatever the world might think--that Hillary was subhuman or of lesser value, a ward of the state or a drag on society--she dominated her world in her full humanness and rich personhood," he writes. A better affirmation of Hillary would be hard to imagine.

Yet Reston is sucked into imagining what would happen if they could produce a clone of Hillary. In his own way, Reston is an innocent--innocent to the implications of what he is saying. I read the following in utter amazement:

In Hillary 2 we relive her birth but correct the atmospherics. No New York doctor on the phone in the hall this time. We glory in her development beyond eighteen months, watch her grow to be nearly six feet tall, watch her beautiful mind develop. In short, we finally experience the potential of Hillary 1 in Hillary 2. Hillary 2 is the child we were robbed of having.

Here Hillary is not the "social, convivial person who loved people and crowds" that Reston described just a few pages before--someone who has "been dealt a very bad hand"--but a failure whose clone would be the child they never had.

Their other children, Maeve and Devin, are fiercely protective of their little sister. I hope they do not read that part of the book

Having said that, it would be very unfair to end on a negative note. Instead let me close with a quote from an excellent review in the Washington Post.

Reston's book teaches something about the value, even the redemption, to be found in the lives of the severely disabled and what they bring into the lives of those who care for them. Fragile Innocence is also a page-turning read. Most of all though, it's the story of a father's discovery--the discovery that love trumps terror, that love finds expression despite seemingly impossible circumstances. It is, in the end, the story of a father's love for his daughter.