An original, well-researched novel that combines exciting plot twists with thought-provoking themes.
In this novel, Adkins (Hannity’s Curse, 2009, etc.), a retired physician, imagines a young doctor’s journey to the Western frontier during the Gold Rush.
In 1849, young Daniel Todd, who’s just graduated from the Massachusetts Medical College of Harvard University, is on his way to the gold camps of California by ship when his vessel sinks in a hurricane. Alone and adrift on a piece of wreckage, he’s rescued by the whaling brig Ellie Mae. It’s through this bit of fortune that Todd begins his career in medicine—a profession that will increasingly test the faith that his reverend father fought to instill in his son. (His father’s words, “Through adversity, perhaps you will find God,” become the book’s key theme.) After a year on the Ellie Mae, “Doc” Todd, now an accomplished whaler, catches a ride on a passing clipper to San Francisco—then a ramshackle frontier town, flush with gold-rush fever. Todd eventually secures the supplies he needs and settles first in Sacramento, where he befriends a miner-turned-reverend named Simon, who’s more philosophical than devout: “Who really knows the answer?” Simon tells Daniel. Against Simon’s advice, Todd leaves for Jacksonville, a rough-and-tumble mining camp in the Oregon Territory. Here, he encounters one terrifying emergency after another, from collapsed mines to breached pregnancies to a smallpox outbreak. He also falls in love with the owner of a cook tent, a young widow named Del, who later falls ill. Adkins uses this situation to show how agonized Todd becomes by the limits of medicine, which cause him to descend into physical and mental illness. He also deftly shows how Todd’s struggle, the most important of his life, defines his journey beyond Jacksonville. Over the course of the story, Adkins draws on both his knowledge as a physician and his skill as a storyteller to portray the diagnosis and treatment of injuries such as bone fractures and many potentially life-threatening maladies. These moments are easily accessible and surprisingly enjoyable to read.
An original, well-researched novel that combines exciting plot twists with thought-provoking themes.Pub Date: June 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4415-3352-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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