The perfect gift for anyone contemplating medical school.
A young physician’s on-the-spot notes from her three-year residency in internal medicine, shaped into a collection of pithy, revealing little stories.
The stories, which range in length from a couple of pages to a dozen, begin with the first morning of Transue’s internship and end on the last evening of her residency. (She received her postgraduate training at four hospitals in Seattle.) The transformation from frazzled, uncertain intern to assured, competent physician is a long process, one the author reveals as exhausting, challenging, full of surprises, and often scary. Nearly half the stories take place during Transue’s first year: it’s as an intern that her experiences with patients are most intense, and it is the year in which she learns the most. Her rotation takes her through intensive care, cardiology, oncology, and the emergency room; death is no stranger in these places, and the narrative shows her growing acceptance of this fact of life. Throughout, the stories focus on patients and their conditions: the homeless man in ER who’s covered in bugs; the battered young liver patient who insists that her boyfriend would never hurt her despite black eyes, bruises, and a broken leg; the teenager wanting her first birth-control prescription; the 70-year-old woman learning that her late husband had given her a sexually transmitted disease; the old doctor dying of prostate cancer. Transue intersperses scenes from her private life—nightclubbing, dancing, sailing, working out at the gym—that offer a sharp contrast to her experiences inside hospital walls and give the reader as well as the author respite from disease and dying. In her second year, she becomes a resident, with responsibility for interns and students as well as for patients, a role that continues in her third year. By then, the excitement has faded, but her confidence has blossomed, and she is well launched in her medical career.
The perfect gift for anyone contemplating medical school.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32483-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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