Welcome evidence that the art of medicine is still being taught and practiced in a world where technology has all the...
Straightforward account of Young’s time in a program that apprentices students to rural physicians.
The author, now a staff physician at the University of Washington, was a medical student there when she learned of WWAMI, a program that exposes medical students to rural medicine in Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. Her first placement was a month-long tour of duty in a remote Eskimo outpost where the standard garb for doctors consisted of jeans, hiking boots, and a stethoscope; her first lessons came mainly from watching and listening. Subsequently, she did hospital rotations in Pocatello, Idaho (pediatrics), and Missoula, Montana (internal medicine). With each assignment, Young’s responsibilities increased and she became more of a participant in patient care. She learned the art of connecting with patients and the importance of listening to their stories. By the end of her third year, in love with medicine as she had seen it practiced and yearning to move beyond the rural Pacific Northwest, she took a residency position in South Africa. The lessons there were harsher. With resources extremely limited, HIV skyrocketing, and tuberculosis and diabetes widespread, Young found that doctors had to choose whom to help; the choice was often simply to help those who had a chance to survive. Overwhelmed by disease and death, she nevertheless completed her residency and returned as a full-fledged general internist to Seattle, where she took on the care of patients in a community of refugees and the homeless. WWAMI, Young avers, gave her “intense glimpses into the human experience” and taught her that the patient’s story, the most human element in medical practice, is often the highest reward of doctoring. As she puts it, “Sometimes I enter a story and find I can bring a little light and relief to human suffering.”
Welcome evidence that the art of medicine is still being taught and practiced in a world where technology has all the glamour.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57061-396-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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