Exactitude is great for surgeons, not so great for storytelling.
A doctor shares the good, the bad and the ugly from his experience in medicine.
Pellegrino, an orthopedic surgeon, begins his book with a brief family history. The author is the hardworking son of poor parents and was moved to study medicine when his mother succumbed to cancer at a young age. The book’s subtitle, with its folksy feel, and the range of Pellegrino’s practice, including volunteer work in Africa and with the poor and uninsured in the United States, create an expectation that the book will have a humanitarian bent. However, the bulk of the book is concerned with Pellegrino’s for-profit practice in American hospitals and clinics, specifically with the more egregious violations of the Hippocratic Oath the doctor witnessed during his years of practice. Pellegrino is now retired, but if he brought to his practice the same skills he brings to the problems he raises in each chapter, he must have been quite adept at his job. The author has an eagle-eye for detail and structure, especially when he dissects the case of an incompetent, dishonest doctor taking advantage of military hospital’s huge bureaucracy to obscure his deceits. Pellegrino’s unwavering dedication to what he believes is right keeps him going through the administrative layers of apathy and denial until he finally makes his case and the offending doctor is removed. But while Pellegrino appears to be the kind of doctor you would want as a surgeon, there is also an unsettling amount of resentment and ill will coloring his narrative. While the doctor seems to be motivated by decency and righteousness, his accounts of clashes with ego-driven, power-mad, money-hungry physicians come bearing big chips on their shoulders. Unfortunately, he can come off persnickety and priggish at these points, and the stiffness of his prose only exacerbates this. There are many good stories here; they just need some warmth and humor to make them truly come alive.
Exactitude is great for surgeons, not so great for storytelling.Pub Date: June 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-47934-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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