A stimulating and moving examination of American health care.
A health care professional recalls a life of entrepreneurial success and the lessons learned from hardship.
Debut author Tramuto was born in 1956 in a small industrial town near Buffalo, New York. From an early age, he weathered extraordinary trials: At the age of 8, he lost most of his hearing in both ears as the result of an infection, an impairment that led to social isolation and academic failure. After a series of experimental surgeries, he recovered much of that hearing only to lose it again years later due to a botched operation. In 1968, the author’s older brother, Gerald, was killed in a car accident, a devastating emotional blow, and another brother, Michael, lost his young wife, Rosemary, during childbirth. Tramuto discusses these anguishes as “bulldozer moments,” calamitous events subsequently transformed into sources of edification and future strength. The author was so moved by his sister-in-law’s death—the consequence of a “routine anesthesia which triggered a violent allergic reaction”—and his own medical tribulations that he started devoting his life to finding innovative ways to more efficiently deliver superior health care. To that end, he’s served in leadership positions at several companies in the health care field and pioneered the development of a digital database that pinpoints complications in drugs undetectable by Food and Drug Administration screenings. The author offers his reflections not only on the nature of business in general, but also on the state of the health care industry in particular as well as broader advice about success in life. Tramuto’s story is an affecting one, and it’s simply not possible for readers to remain unmoved by his Herculean displays of tenacity in the face of misfortune. The writing is clear and sharp and combines a near confessional candor with rigorous analysis. The author’s experience and expertise in health care are evident on nearly every page. His meticulous, politically unbiased assessment of the industry in the United States is among the highlights of this book, written with Black (co-author: The Money Guy, 2014, etc.). Ultimately, Tramuto recommends a tectonic shift from “a sickness system to a wellness system” that “will not only save the insurers money but will encourage a healthier society,” a position described in impressively nuanced terms. Sometimes the work’s discussion of business slides into the well-worn grooves familiar to the genre—there’s a lot of talk of transformational leadership, “collaborative IQ,” entrepreneurial disruption, and the like. In addition, much of the counsel dispensed is in the form of timeworn tropes about the importance of setting priorities, the educational value of one’s mistakes, and the inarguable significance of a healthy corporate culture. Tramuto’s advice is always eminently sensible but often well-trafficked. Yet the autobiographical narrative is so inspiring the book as a whole simply can’t be reduced to any formulaic type; Tramuto’s life is cinematically heroic. And the explorations of health care policy transcend the normal partisan divisions in public discourse and should be required reading for loyalists on both sides. The thoughtful treatment of the Affordable Care Act alone is worth the price of the book.
A stimulating and moving examination of American health care.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7618-6855-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Hamilton Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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 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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