With her second perceptive memoir, Transue claims a solid place in the growing ranks of doctors who write well.
Another memorable collection of medical stories and essays from young physician Transue (On Call: A Doctor’s Days and Nights in Residency, 2004).
The author, who also teaches creative writing at the University of Washington School of Medicine, begins her second memoir on her first day in private practice as a primary-care physician in Seattle. She shows herself learning valuable life lessons from her patients, but she broadens her scope to include family, and the lessons include ones about love and loss, grief and healing. As Transue was launching her practice, her father, who had dementia, was slowly dying, and her beloved elderly grandparents struggled with poor health. “I was learning the role a primary care physician plays in people’s lives,” she writes. “Being a daughter and granddaughter was equally important, as I followed the people I loved in the journey toward the end of life. The two roles enriched and informed each other.” Though often poignant and even somber—she lost both her father and her grandmother during this period, and some of her patients suffered from terminal illnesses—her stories are suffused with warmth, revealing the special relationship that can develop between an empathetic doctor and a trusting patient. There’s humor, too, as Transue touches on the mishaps and misunderstandings that are part of running a private practice, as well as the funny things that patients think and say and do. In a section entitled “Words,” she mulls over some of the euphemisms and odd word usages of her profession and the apt neologisms of patients. When one patient blended “drugs” and “groggy” to tell her that a medication made him “too droggy to drive,” she added the term to her own vocabulary.
With her second perceptive memoir, Transue claims a solid place in the growing ranks of doctors who write well.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37278-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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