A sometimes rambling but more often incisive memoir from a retired top-rank anesthesiologist looking back on a long career.
First-time author and retired anesthesiologist Zeitlin elucidates the hands-on business of delivering sweet oblivion to surgical patients with as little risk as possible.
The Cambridge-educated son of a family doctor, Zeitlin concludes early on that coming to America—particularly in and around Boston, where he spends most of his Harvard-linked career—is the only way to avoid stagnation in the medical hierarchy on the other side of the pond. He retains so vivid a memory of his early days that, more than half a century later, he can recall whole conversations verbatim—or so his liberal use of quotation marks would suggest. But the author’s intellect, huge fund of subject knowledge, and high purpose more than compensate for any stylistic faults, such as his tendency to become unstuck in time as he relates anecdotes that range freely from the near-present to long ago. He beautifully captures the challenge and allure of his high-stakes craft: observing and, as much as possible, controlling the real-time response of the human organism to a variety of pain-obliterating anesthetics, whose merciful workings even now remain somewhat mysterious. His disturbing account of a young female patient’s unexpected response to anesthesia is brutally candid, right down to his abiding regret over never speaking to her family on his lawyer’s advice. The book’s greatest and most scholarly strength is its decade-by-decade recitation of advances and missteps in anesthesiology. There was, for example, the era of cyclopropane, a drug so explosive that static electricity could ignite it. The author also touches on the status-based frictions between rock-star surgeons and anesthesiologists, who are more apt to get the blame than the glory. As an offset, Zeitlin provides a short list of anesthesiologist heroes and what they accomplished. In the end, the author says, vastly improved monitoring devices deserve much credit for safety advances, but split-second judgments by “gas men” still make the difference.
A sometimes rambling but more often incisive memoir from a retired top-rank anesthesiologist looking back on a long career.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463798062
Page Count: 274
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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