A candid and revealing portrait of a man and a nation in turmoil.
The story of an American physician who faced medical, personal, and cultural challenges at a hospital in Jerusalem.
In his engrossing debut memoir, Waldman, a pediatric oncologist and associate chief in the division of palliative care at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago, recounts 7 years as attending physician at the Hadassah Medical Center, where his young patients included Israeli Jews and Arabs and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. His motivation for moving to Israel was to make aliyah, contributing to the success of the Zionist project; he hoped, also, to find meaning and purpose for his life. Growing up in suburban Connecticut, the son of a conservative rabbi, Waldman had majored in religious studies and felt nurtured by his faith until he began working as a doctor, confronted daily with suffering and death. Part of his reason for emigrating was to make sense of his spiritual crisis and, not least, to find a true home: he had been moving from place to place, “fixated on erasing the person I used to be.” In Jerusalem, in his first senior position, he became aware of some profound shortcomings: nowhere in his medical training, for example, was he ever taught how to address his patients’ spiritual needs. In fact, he adds, “at no point was I even taught that it’s an issue at all.” Nor did he have a clear understanding of the oppression and racism experienced by Arabs, no matter where they lived. Palestinian families had to endure hours at multiple military checkpoints to bring their desperately sick children to the hospital. Even a beloved Arab nurse was often treated “as though she is a traitor, an Arab Uncle Tom.” Jews questioned her competence. Besides offering warm portraits of the children he treated and their distraught families, Waldman chronicles his transformation from a somewhat naïve, underprepared physician to one more politically and culturally astute.
A candid and revealing portrait of a man and a nation in turmoil.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4332-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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