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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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