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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
