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WHITE COAT

Name: WHITE COAT
Author: Ellen Lerner Rothman
ISBN: 0-688-15313-5

BECOMING A DOCTOR AT HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

by Ellen Lerner Rothman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999

This medical coming-of-age story is told with clarity, candor and grace and would make a fine graduation present for any...

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A medical student’s thoughtful and revealing chronicle of growing into the white coat of a doctor under Harvard Medical School’s New Pathway system, beginning with day one of orientation and ending with graduation four years later.

In the new tutorial system, which emphasizes a three-year course in patient-doctor relations, students are introduced immediately to patients, learning to take medical histories in their first year and how to perform physical exams in their second. Rothman, whose interest in medical ethics led her to medical school, flourished under this humanistic approach. Expecting that tough course work and long hours would be the toughest hurdles, she found instead that accepting the responsibility that comes with the white coat was a greater challenge. She is a careful observer and meticulous reporter, providing the kind of detail that prospective medical students will find invaluable. She gives a clear overall picture of how the program is organized and what students are expected to know and do at each stage of their education and then fills this in with chapters describing her own experiences with patients, doctors, and fellow students. While she has changed names and details, her description of these encounters and her reactions to them, especially the stories about patients, have the clear ring of truth. They're not pretty and often have no neat ending, but through them, the conscience of a compassionate doctor can be seen developing. What is refreshing about Rothman’s account is its matter-of-fact style, notably lacking in whining, sensationalism, and disguised boasting. We also follow her romance with a fellow student that ends in marriage just before graduation and the promise of parallel careers to follow.

This medical coming-of-age story is told with clarity, candor and grace and would make a fine graduation present for any pre-med student.

Pub Date: April 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-688-15313-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)