A rather grandiose self-assessment that may appeal to someone whose life has been saved by the Heimlich maneuver—not likely...
A self-promoting memoir from the inventor of the abdominal thrust technique that bears his name.
A retired thoracic surgeon, Heimlich launches into his prideful narrative by relating how he faced and overcame anti-Semitism early in his career; how, as a 21-year-old camp counselor, he saved the life of a man trapped in a train wreck; and how, as a young medical officer in the U.S. Navy, he saved the sight of many Chinese soldiers by medicating their eyes with a concoction he invented. Some years after the war, Heimlich, working with dogs, developed a reverse gastric tube procedure that replaced or bypassed the esophagus, thus enabling patients with damaged ones to swallow (the author credits Romanian doctor Dan Gavriliu, who independently developed a similar procedure). Later, he designed a drainage mechanism with a flutter valve that prevented fluids or air from returning to the chest after surgery and an unobtrusive oxygen delivery device for patients with breathing problems. His best known achievement, however, is the Heimlich maneuver, a simple emergency technique that forces air out of the lungs of a choking person, enabling an object lodged in the airway to be expelled. This technique, writes the author, is also effective for treating asthma and victims of drowning. His ideas have not been universally accepted, and he is still battling with the Red Cross over its recommendation to first try back slaps on choking victims. Heimlich’s claim that malariotherapy (injections of malaria-infected blood) can be an effective treatment of HIV/AIDS patients has also met with opposition. Heimlich’s plainly written memoir, replete with pictures of himself and anecdotes featuring him with grateful patients, is not just a personal story but a sharp criticism of a medical system that he sees as too slow to accept or at least research controversial new ideas.
A rather grandiose self-assessment that may appeal to someone whose life has been saved by the Heimlich maneuver—not likely to reach a wider readership.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-849-2
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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