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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.
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The former first lady opens up about her early life, her journey to the White House, and the eight history-making years that followed.
It’s not surprising that Obama grew up a rambunctious kid with a stubborn streak and an “I’ll show you” attitude. After all, it takes a special kind of moxie to survive being the first African-American FLOTUS—and not only survive, but thrive. For eight years, we witnessed the adversity the first family had to face, and now we get to read what it was really like growing up in a working-class family on Chicago’s South Side and ending up at the world’s most famous address. As the author amply shows, her can-do attitude was daunted at times by racism, leaving her wondering if she was good enough. Nevertheless, she persisted, graduating from Chicago’s first magnet high school, Princeton, and Harvard Law School, and pursuing careers in law and the nonprofit world. With her characteristic candor and dry wit, she recounts the story of her fateful meeting with her future husband. Once they were officially a couple, her feelings for him turned into a “toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder.” But for someone with a “natural resistance to chaos,” being the wife of an ambitious politician was no small feat, and becoming a mother along the way added another layer of complexity. Throw a presidential campaign into the mix, and even the most assured woman could begin to crack under the pressure. Later, adjusting to life in the White House was a formidable challenge for the self-described “control freak”—not to mention the difficulty of sparing their daughters the ugly side of politics and preserving their privacy as much as possible. Through it all, Obama remained determined to serve with grace and help others through initiatives like the White House garden and her campaign to fight childhood obesity. And even though she deems herself “not a political person,” she shares frank thoughts about the 2016 election.
An engrossing memoir as well as a lively treatise on what extraordinary grace under extraordinary pressure looks like.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6313-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2018
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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