An engrossing profile of Hardy Hendren, chief of surgery at Boston's Children's Hospital, whose skills are devoted to undoing ``nature's worst mistakes.'' Miller, a staff writer for Rhode Island's Providence Journal-Bulletin, entwines a second tale with Hendren's—that of a family (the ``Moores'') whose daughter Lucy is born in late l989 with gross deformities affecting many of her internal organs. The two stories come together in the OR at Children's Hospital, where Hendren spends over 16 hours undoing the anatomic confusion of 14-month-old Lucy's body. Miller heightens the suspense of this scene, which spans most of the book, by repeatedly stepping away to describe Hendren's life—his childhood, schooling, military service, marriage, family, relations with colleagues, even his strong opinions on malpractice lawyers (``scurrilous, unprincipled bastards''), the ACLU (``weirdos and creeps''), and the high crime-rate (he favors public executions). Nicknamed ``Hardly Human'' for his bedside manner or perhaps his prodigious memory, or, even more likely, for his OR stamina, Hendren at 64 is a surgeon at the peak of his career, highly confident and highly competent. Although concentrating on Hendren as a tough M.D., Miller also shows him as a devoted husband, a father helpless to cure his own daughter's diabetes, and a proud grandfather. Occasionally, Miller overdetails Hendren's biographical background and includes material that seems to belong in some other book (the story of one Max Warburg's leukemia is unrelated to either Hendren or the Moores). Miller is at his riveting best when describing surgery and the atmosphere of the OR. A well-researched, well-told tale of surgical expertise transforming bodies and lives. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-40264-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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