Aashisha reviews the upcoming biography of David Rhoiney No One’s Coming to Save You, releasing on 8 Dec, 2026.
No One’s Coming To Save You by Ed William is the true story of David Rhoiney, a boy who spent his childhood in a homeless shelter and grew up to become a renowned vascular surgeon. But between those two extreme stages of his life, David goes through events most people don’t in multiple lifetimes. He is five when his father abandons them and his mother with a severe bipolar disorder is taken away, leaving him to fend for himself. Somehow surviving at the back of a Volkswagen Jetta and barely avoiding shootings, he holds on to one thing with all he has.
Basketball. He hoards old copies of SLAM at Millikan High, studies Kobe frame by frame and creates a career for himself. Just when he thinks things are looking up, he shatters his wrist and a surgeon tells him he’ll never play again. He knows it’s his only way out so he ignores every warning, talks his way as an assistant coach, and learns the game from the sidelines.
What kind of an Ironist are You?
This is when life throws him a line and an assistant coach from the U.S. Naval Academy recruits him. From there, he moves to Annapolis, works on submarines, and goes on to cryptology. He even ends up doing a nine-month tour at Guantánamo Bay that everyone warns him is career suicide. I loved how he said: humans are the flaw. Imagine the kid they whispered about in Compton is now the one the President’s office wants an opinion from.
He goes through a spate of medical school rejections, and finally, becomes a vascular surgeon. Every chapter of David’s journey reminds us of the price he had to pay to just exist in a world with all odds stacked against him.
I enjoyed the structure of the book, the way it was built in five acts, like a movie production. The biographer Ed William is a movie critic and writer, after all. Every act is named after the dissolution of a cell’s nucleus, the beginning of its death: Karyolysis, Aberration, Anabiosis, Adaptation, and Karyogamy; a neat way to use medical terminology to show Rhoiney’s grueling transformation.
I loved how Ed renders the mother not as a villain or a saint but complicated all the way through. Anyone who has loved someone who was also, at times, the source of the danger would recognize David’s love for his mother.
If you liked Black Man in a White Coat by Damon Tweedy, or The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, you’ll find this story honest and hardhitting. When I started the book, I thought of the title as a hard truth I had to accept. By the time I finished, I realized that the fact David had to save himself leaves open a bigger question for our society: how many children with talent but lacking the will do not end up saving themselves?
–
Contributed by
Aashisha
