by Emily R. Transue ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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by Jon Krakauer
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by Jon Krakauer
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by Jon Krakauer
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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