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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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