by Allan H. Ropper ; Brian David Burrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2014
Compassionate, useful reading related by an expert in his field.
A renowned neurologist examines some important questions: “[W]hat does it mean to be the patient faced with these seismic problems, and how is a connection made with the physician who embodies the knowledge that can make it better?”
Harvard Medical School professor and Brigham and Women’s Hospital master clinician Ropper and writer Burrell make an intellectual, sympathetic team: One brings the meat and potatoes to the table, the other, a measure of distance. They exhibit both a hungry curiosity and an elegant writing style married to the humbleness that comes from standing at the edge of the rabbit hole. The meat and potatoes are the individual cases that have crossed Ropper’s path and that the authors have framed into stories. These neurological tales shimmer and flash, a wily combination of Oliver Sacks and Berton Roueché, “through the painstaking examination of the patient. Every gesture, every movement, every inflection of speech, every reflex, all these point to the precise location of the problem in the nervous system.” Though a neurologist has to be well-acquainted with the design and function of the nervous system and use the latest technology, it’s also vitally important to “[s]tick with the patient’s story and the bedside exam.” Ropper’s patients range all over the place, from heroic to discomfiting to scary, and his predilection to neurological arcana makes for gripping material—as one patient recalled, “When they started…the hallucinations, what I saw first was Queen Elizabeth and her corgis in my fireplace…I also had Dick Tracy come by. He had a yellow overcoat. It was Warren Beatty.” The author explores a wide variety of conditions, including the exterior degeneration of ALS and the often befuddling symptoms of advanced brain trauma, but he rarely falls into jargon and always keeps the narrative lively and engaging.
Compassionate, useful reading related by an expert in his field.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03498-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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