From physician Muñoz, a chronicle of becoming a doctor at the extremely demanding Johns Hopkins cardiology program.
After an introduction, the opening section of this memoir of a year of fellowship rotations at Johns Hopkins hospital—a fellowship is a three-to-four–year, post-residency position overseeing residents while being overseen by an attending specialist—is ill-advised. The author drones on about his pedigree—Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Johns Hopkins again—the odds of becoming a Hopkins Fellow (1 in 10,000), and the Navy SEAL–like training involved (the book’s title speaks volumes), and it exudes smug superiority. But forgive these mercifully few pages to get a quite satisfying immersion into what medical specialization requires. Muñoz thankfully shifts from embarrassingly tedious to humanely sympathetic as he chronicles how he had to acquire a measure of expertise in what can be described as stations of the cardiology cross: consultation, nuclear medicine, heart failure and transplantation, intensive care, electrophysiology, echocardiography, and more. The author is honest enough to admit which tasks bored him, which opened him up to the big picture—how a heart transplant is not just about blood type, but “habits, foibles, fears”—which attending doctors he admired and why (“Dr. Franklin’s ability to listen and connect with his patients also means that they are often extremely well informed”), or why not to jump to fast conclusions. Muñoz has nothing new to say about some old questions—“Why are we allowed to make these calls over people’s fates? Who are we to decide? It’s fair. It’s not fair. Someone has to do it. No one should do it”—and he pays no more than lip service to the critical quality of empathy. He shines, however, in explaining a wide variety of conditions, and there is polish to the patient vignettes, giving them deeply human appeal.
Muñoz offers little turning of new ground in what has become a fertile genre, but the book is enjoyably idiosyncratic and elucidative.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6887-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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