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
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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