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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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