A story of a successful woman in the medical field that could have used more reflection.
In Callan’s (Sevoflurane, 2012) memoir, a female physician fights sexism and rises steadily through the ranks of her profession by learning to take a stand and stick with it.
Medicine is one of many professions in which women have made significant strides over the past several decades. In this, her second book, the author relates the story of her own experience in that profession and shows how her decisiveness was a key factor in her career advancement. From her childhood in World War II–era Ireland through her days as a medical resident, Callan shows how episodes in her early life, such as attending parochial school, helped define her future personality. She has had a long and varied career in medicine, state government, the pharmaceutical industry, and professional organizations, including the American Medical Association. Her decisive personality and determination, fortunately, allowed her to avoid sexist marginalization. Callan’s book is written in an easy-to-read style, as she thankfully eschews confusing medical terminology in favor of a conversational manner. Unfortunately, her choice to make the book a laundry list of every minute aspect of her life makes the overall story seem rushed. Nowhere is this truer than in the descriptions of her husband and children; readers learn their names but barely anything about their personalities. Some parts of Callan’s extremely diverse career, such as her battles with entrenched AMA officials to make the organization more responsive to physicians’ needs and less reactive to new ideas, might have benefited from more elaboration than she provides here. Instead, she sticks to a then-this-happened, then-that-happened style that makes the book read like an encyclopedia entry. She has clearly had a long, remarkable career in a difficult environment, but readers—especially women—might have benefited from deeper insight.
A story of a successful woman in the medical field that could have used more reflection.Pub Date: June 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1480808072
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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