In this unsparingly honest chronicle, Tweedy cohesively illuminates the experiences of black doctors and black patients and...
An arresting memoir that personalizes the enduring racial divide in contemporary American medicine.
When North Carolina physician and psychiatry professor Tweedy first entered Duke University Medical School as one of only six black students on a full-tuition scholarship, he was already well-aware of the vast health disparities between black and white populations, where lack of insurance and “poverty topped the list of culprits.” Throughout grueling years of intensive schooling and patient care, the doctor repeatedly pondered his role as a black physician in a predominantly white medical community. Tweedy devotes equal time to his academic term in medical school, to a yearlong clinical apprenticeship where he swiftly became “consumed by the broader health problems of my race,” and to his former psychiatry practice. Early on in his career at Duke, his resolve was tested when a professor mistook him for a janitor, yet he remained committed. Tweedy’s tenure throughout his hospital internship forms the memoir’s riveting centerpiece. Structured around fast-paced, eye-opening medical cases encountered on clinical rotations, many episodes are tainted with the stigma of social, racial, and economically charged misconceptions and biases. The author includes anecdotes featuring prejudiced patients and discriminatory doctors as well as one about a longtime-married Christian man’s shocking HIV seroconversion. Tweedy also shares his own battles with inherited kidney disorders and hypertension along with lucid thoughts on a physician’s obligation to community health and the liberating power of tolerance. Clearly at odds with the racial and class-stratified machinations of the medical industry, the author writes with dignified authority on the imbalances in opportunities and available social and medical service platforms to the many African-American patients seeking clinical care and of his pivotal role in making a difference.
In this unsparingly honest chronicle, Tweedy cohesively illuminates the experiences of black doctors and black patients and reiterates the need for improved understanding of racial differences within global medical communities.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04463-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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