An engrossing—if sometimes disturbingly graphic—story of the author's evolution from a newly minted MD to an expert trauma...
A candid look at the life of a trauma surgeon who has served as a reserve officer with the US Special Operations Command, as well as the urban trenches of the United States.
After 20 years on the job, Cole explains why he considers himself privileged to work in such a demanding career. He writes that “trauma surgeons…thrive on taking patients who are dying in a dramatic fashion and exhaust their own energies to give their patients the chance to live.” His patients have ranged from the elite to the homeless, from soldiers to drug-pushers and from the youngest to the elderly, all of whom received his best efforts as a surgeon. Despite his commitment to giving his best to every patient, he admits that only after suffering the miserable experience of providing emergency front-line care under conditions of desert warfare in Iraq could he connect emotionally with the lives of “social derelicts, deviants and bums.” His training as a resident surgeon was grueling—continuously on-call, sleep-derived, taking meals on the run and even once spending 26 consecutive hours in the operating room treating an elderly diabetic with damaged arteries. A high point came when he assisted in brain surgery on a 4-year-old who had been shot while playing on the street. It looked like a hopeless situation, but a year later, smiling and alert, the boy walked into the hospital with his mother to thank the doctors. Cole provides a satisfying bird’s-eye view of operations in progress, revealing the difficult split-second, life-or-death decisions that surgeons must make.
An engrossing—if sometimes disturbingly graphic—story of the author's evolution from a newly minted MD to an expert trauma surgeon.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-55222-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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