Raucous, imaginative entertainment.
A robot doctor makes the rounds in this wacky medical fantasia.
Mount Sinai Hospital’s newest intern, Dr. Alan Rossum, is too good to be true–or at least human. He’s “fireproof, germ-retardant, buoyant, unstainable, extremely flexible and even shrink-resistant,” can diagnose most patients just by looking at them, and is already an expert in every specialty. His preternatural good looks and comforting bedside manner provoke all women to throw themselves at him, though his heart belongs to the elevator computer with the lilting loudspeaker. Best of all, in the eyes of the cost-conscious hospital management that bought him, he’s cheap, doesn’t mind odd hours and never goes on strike. But even when his leg is blown off and he must go hopping across the grounds to retrieve it, no one, aside from a ten-year-old boy in the psych ward, particularly notices that Rossum is an android. He hardly stands out at a place where the top surgeon is blind and dismembered corpses are spliced back together and reanimated. His presence does, however, arouse the wrath of the mysterious M.A.F.–either the Medical Anti-Defamation Foundation or the Mobsters Against Fysicians, according to a high-priced abbreviations consultant–a terrorist group that launches high-concept attacks on the hospital’s board. One director is permanently magnetized by an MRI machine while another is pushed into a giant photocopier and emerges with a compulsive urge to mimic everyone he encounters. Simmons, an internist and author of The Z-Papers (1976, etc.), orchestrates the hijinks with a healthy disregard for rhyme and reason. His surreal gags puts one in mind of Douglas Adams, had he written A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Medical Center. (A stint in Mount Sinai’s extraterrestrial’s ward makes for one of Dr. Rossum’s most hilarious adventures.) The result is a pixilated comedy that’s as light as a balloon filled with laughing-gas.
Raucous, imaginative entertainment.Pub Date: March 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3053-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.
In her first novel to be published in English, South Korean writer Han divides a story about strange obsessions and metamorphosis into three parts, each with a distinct voice.
Yeong-hye and her husband drift through calm, unexceptional lives devoid of passion or anything that might disrupt their domestic routine until the day that Yeong-hye takes every piece of meat from the refrigerator, throws it away, and announces that she's become a vegetarian. Her decision is sudden and rigid, inexplicable to her family and a society where unconventional choices elicit distaste and concern that borders on fear. Yeong-hye tries to explain that she had a dream, a horrifying nightmare of bloody, intimate violence, and that's why she won't eat meat, but her husband and family remain perplexed and disturbed. As Yeong-hye sinks further into both nightmares and the conviction that she must transform herself into a different kind of being, her condition alters the lives of three members of her family—her husband, brother-in-law, and sister—forcing them to confront unsettling desires and the alarming possibility that even with the closest familiarity, people remain strangers. Each of these relatives claims a section of the novel, and each section is strikingly written, equally absorbing whether lush or emotionally bleak. The book insists on a reader’s attention, with an almost hypnotically serene atmosphere interrupted by surreal images and frighteningly recognizable moments of ordinary despair. Han writes convincingly of the disruptive power of longing and the choice to either embrace or deny it, using details that are nearly fantastical in their strangeness to cut to the heart of the very human experience of discovering that one is no longer content with life as it is.
An unusual and mesmerizing novel, gracefully written and deeply disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-44818-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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