by Daniel Fulkerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2016
An engaging reflection on the surgeon’s lot that’s humorous and poignant in equal measure.
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A debut memoir from a pediatric neurosurgeon that portrays hospital life at its absurd best and its tragic worst.
In several vignettes, Fulkerson (Neurological Surgery/Indiana Univ. School of Medicine) dramatizes his experiences in neurosurgery at what he dubs “the Baby Hospital.” His second year of medical school closed with the sobering loss of a series of patients. But during his time there, he worked with a colorful cast of co-workers, including “the Old Man,” a maverick who developed the neurosurgery department; “Grandpa P.,” the Old Man’s successor as chairman; and Thomas, a hyperactive but highly compassionate surgeon. None of them fit Fulkerson’s caustic stereotype of neurosurgeons: “stern, pompous douchenozzles with executive silver hair and a God complex.” The book’s funny, informal dialogue shines during recalled cases that range from the scatological—a rectal abscess—to the unconventional yet ingenious, as when the Old Man cooled a patient’s head by sticking his bed halfway out a window. The metaphors are memorable, too, such as a cerebral palsy patient who was “twisted…into a macabre pretzel” and a head wound’s “sickening sorbet of blood, fluid and grayish mush.” The author vividly describes his obstetric and psychiatric rotations as well as a medical mission to Kenya and two years of ROTC service in Japan. Grandpa P. then lured him back to the hospital with a neurosurgery residency. Fulkerson notes that his line of work “forces one to ask the big questions” of why kids get sick and die. “Unfortunately,” he laments, “it is loath to give back the big answers.” Two unforgettable patients include a 5-year-old with a gunshot wound to the head who survived skull surgery and a subsequent infection and a teenager who died of a brain tumor days after being voted prom queen. Despite the crushing sadness he’s witnessed, Fulkerson says that he still believes in God and the goodness of the world: “you have to take so much joy in the children who do well that it blocks out the pain from the ones who don’t.” (Includes 15 black-and-white photographs and diagrams.)
An engaging reflection on the surgeon’s lot that’s humorous and poignant in equal measure.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4808-3944-1
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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