A unique memoir that provides a rare window into the Saudi kingdom.
A CEO chronicles how Saudi Arabia’s royal family carried out a hostile takeover of the private hospital he led.
Utgard, an American hospital executive with international experience, spent three years in Saudi Arabia, from 1998 to 2001, trying to turn around the struggling Al-Salama Hospital in Jeddah. Its owner, Sheik Khalid Bin Mahfouz, one of the world’s richest men—later rumored to have ties to Osama bin Laden—recruited Utgard through intermediaries. This foreshadowed a consistent pattern: Although holding the title of chief executive, Utgard never dealt directly with the so-called powers that be. In his debut, Utgard tells his story in clear prose and granular detail. From the outset, his assignment appears misbegotten. The board chairman never attends any meetings; a multimillion-dollar remodeling project lacks a written contract and stalls repeatedly over payment disputes; representatives from the royal family’s hospital in Riyadh enthusiastically propose a strategic partnership, then will not return phone calls; deadlines and commitments evaporate like mirages. Subterfuge and misdirection rule the day, symbolized by a euphemism Utgard uses to describe the acquisition: “reverse privatization.” Ample conflict drives the action, and Utgard sketches his characters convincingly, but their dialogue occasionally sounds unnatural since he forces into it explanatory information better left to narration. Meanwhile, the pace bogs down when storytelling yields to documenting the historical record, and detailed accounts of staff meetings and management strategies sometimes read like an academic textbook or legal deposition. On the other hand, the book is highly personal, with insightful observations about Saudi business practices, culture and geography. Utgard, an outdoor enthusiast, peppers the narrative with tales of family vacations, desert road trip and diving in the Red Sea; an entire chapter is a travelogue of places he visited on days off work. This amalgam may prove too personal for some business readers, while managerial minutiae may overwhelm general readers. However, it’s a valuable case study, particularly for anyone in hospital administration, and a broader cautionary tale about the risks of operating private enterprises where governments wield unchecked power.
A unique memoir that provides a rare window into the Saudi kingdom.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 978-1412065658
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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 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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