A sometimes-grisly but compulsively readable look behind the surgeon’s mask.
A former surgeon for the New York City Police Department recounts his life from his Long Beach, New York, childhood to 9/11.
“This is not your ordinary biography of a doctor,” says debut author Fried in his introduction, and, indeed, his life is an extraordinary one. Once a smart, chubby kid interested in photography and working for the family’s used-furniture store, he later became a mildly anti-social medical student and, finally, a fledgling surgeon. He took part in a program that whittled 40 interns down to eight chief residents over five years, which made sleep a stranger to him and his home life an afterthought. As a surgeon, he encountered death and dismemberment on a daily basis—at one point, the memoir blurs into a series of capsule case studies that aren’t for the squeamish. He also dealt with the monotony of checking new police recruits for hernias and hemorrhoids. Interspersed are tales of egomaniacal, money-obsessed colleagues; the sometimes-stodgy machinations of bureaucracies; a stint reviewing malpractice suits; a mysterious police detective known only as “Trenchcoat”; and the author’s struggle to balance a demanding, stressful career with the needs of a young family. It’s a tremendous amount of life to pack into a few hundred pages, but Fried’s writing is cleareyed and no-nonsense throughout, which is fitting for someone whose profession doesn’t allow do-overs. As a result, the author’s prose can appear somewhat detached at times—he sketches his youthful years without sentiment, and his younger brother merits little more than a paragraph—but Fried admits that years of surgical training taught him to keep his emotions under control. This ultimately helps the book, as it would likely be a grueling read, otherwise; when Fried does go into deeply personal experiences, such as his near-fatal struggle with hepatitis B or his frankly terrifying time at the World Trade Center site during 9/11, they’re more evocative because of the contrast. Elsewhere, the author’s bone-dry sense of humor helps put even horrific situations into perspective. Overall, he remains an optimistic presence in a life story that could have been a litany of tragedy.
A sometimes-grisly but compulsively readable look behind the surgeon’s mask.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4628-9
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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