Enthralling medical procedural with real depth and pathos.
In Foster’s intense hospital thriller, a hard-pressed emergency room doctor copes with medical crises, malevolent bureaucrats and vicious gangbangers.
There’s so much excitement in the ordinary workings of a hospital emergency room that a plot is hardly necessary to hold readers' interest in the doings of Dr. Alex Randolph, chief of emergency medicine at the for-profit Mason-Dixon Regional Medical Center in rural Maryland. Confronting him every day are strokes, heart attacks and trauma cases where a minute’s delay in treatment can spell the difference between life and death. There are floods of school children with colds—but hidden among them could be a kid whose lethargy and runny nose signal a deadly case of meningitis. There are scammers faking back pain to score a Percocet scrip and, more ominously, a sudden rash of heroin overdoses. Then into the ER walks Julio, a wounded chieftain of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, accompanied by three stony, snarling thugs; their arrival heralds a drug war that will put the ER staff in the crossfire. Alex has an off-duty life and a tepid romance with a nurse, but the hospital is the novel’s magnetic center. Foster, himself an ER doctor, writes with a lucid, supple prose that illuminates the physician’s art while bringing out the human drama that entwines it. He skillfully evokes the barely controlled chaos and high-wire camaraderie of the ER and regales readers with intricate, absorbing accounts of the struggle to stabilize, diagnose and treat patients under extreme pressure. Alex is an engaging guide to this scene; outwardly he’s a Dr. Jekyll oozing polite concern, inwardly he’s a Mr. Hyde seething at slackers, addicts, parents who neglect their kids and the corporate executives at Mason-Dixon who care more about pushing paper and fighting turf battles than they do about patients. On its way to a riveting climax, Alex’s saga gives us a vivid dispatch from the front lines of American medicine.
Enthralling medical procedural with real depth and pathos.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615493886
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Macdougall
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
