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
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
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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