An entertainingly anecdotal, candid, and perspicacious account of a psychiatrist’s career.
A psychiatrist reflects on a long career filled with intriguing patients.
Over the course of debut author Green’s stint as a psychiatrist—he spent 46 years in practice—he encountered just about every kind of patient, the most memorable of which he charmingly chronicles in this recollection. He divides his brief memoir into short-term cases (sometimes a specific problem is adequately addressed quickly or a patient simply abandons treatment) and long-term ones—Green treated one woman for about 30 years. Between those two categories, he groups the patients he managed thematically: anxiety, homesickness, suicide, and more as well as ones that illustrate the mistakes he’s made. In one grouping labeled “Love,” the author freely admits he doesn’t know how to define romance (“I’m just a psychiatrist”), an endearingly unaffected moment of humility characteristic of the entire book. Some of the problems recounted to Green are peculiar—a successful professor simultaneously grieves the loss of a child and his uncommonly small penis. In another instance, the author treated a man who murdered his fiancee when she tried to end the relationship. Along the way, Green lucidly offers the lessons he’s learned, including the limitations of a psychiatrist’s power to produce a cure. He also provides some more general reflections on the psychological state of society, including, for example, the manner in which the current opioid crisis mirrors a general failing on the part of communities at large. The author’s work, while intellectually rigorous, is not written in the dry academic language of a clinician, but is refreshingly informal and unabashed. He doesn’t hesitate to call one patient a “very crazy woman.” And his advice to anyone being doggedly pursued by a potentially violent stalker is not what readers might expect: “Although it is difficult to do, moving far away, remaining incognito, seems like the only safe way. I, myself, would do either that or carry a pistol and if the guy broke the restraining order and came to see me anyway, I would shoot both of his kneecaps while backing off.” Especially for readers about to embark on a career in psychiatry or mental health, this book delivers a cheerfully wise and delightfully frank meditation on an eventful professional life.
An entertainingly anecdotal, candid, and perspicacious account of a psychiatrist’s career.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4834-8315-3
Page Count: 82
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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