Although prone to self-dramatizing hyperbole, former coronary care nurse Heron (Intensive Care: The Story of a Nurse, 1987) is passionate and persuasive in this second memoir cataloguing the frustrations of the profession that ultimately burned her out. Heron says she likes nursing because she enjoys helping people. But she's beginning to wonder if nursing is good for her health: Arrogant doctors, callous administrators, and an overwhelming workload combine to put Heron into a perpetual rage as she strides through the corridors of San Francisco's Redwoods Memorial Hospital. There is raw emotion in her sketches of such patients as the woman dying of cancer whose doctor refuses to prescribe pain medication though she is in agony (thanks to Heron, she eventually gets morphine). Meanwhile, the rest of her life is looking up. Her first biography has hit the bestseller lists; she's getting fan mail from readers; and she has overcome her terror of public speaking. Asked to address the graduating class of the nursing school she attended, she is full of brave new words (``I progressed into a narrative about how...nurses are often deprived of autonomy and respect''). She even enters into a romance; but the man, 14 years her junior, starts to back away after a few months. Realizing that she is ``in the land beyond burnout,'' Heron leaves the hospital and moves to Montserrat as the caretaker of a vacation house whose owners rarely use it. There, surrounded by gorgeous views, gargantuan insects, and lush vegetation, she finds the peace she craves—for the moment. Partly a lonely woman's cry for companionship, partly the story of her transition from nurse to full-time writer, and partly a vivid portrait of life at a major hospital. The first two portions sometimes lag, but the third—which is the bulk of the book—is an engaging read. (First serial to Glamour; Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-449-90782-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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