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 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
PERSPECTIVES
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