The life story, and heartrending ruminations, of Mahoney, a good veterinarian operating in the suspect terrain of medical research on primates. Mahoney is the former acting director of LEMSIP, the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, at New York University. The creatures under his command—from rhesus monkeys to chimpanzees, baboons to marmosets—were subjects used in the search for vaccines and cures for such diseases as AIDS and hepatitis. But Mahoney is no vivisectionist ghoul. Although he sees “no alternative to using animals in research,” he well understands that the animals pay a heavy price for their involuntary contribution: physically, emotionally, psychologically. And trained in compassion, he is not unaware of the irony involved in his work, the nexus of veterinary and human medicine, where any Hippocratic oath sworn by vets toward animals is subsumed by the need for answers to human ailments. He has worked hard to eliminate the ghetto conditions for animals in research facilities, to ameliorate the shattering isolation experienced by infected primates, to erase euthanasia as the fate of no-longer-useful test subjects; yet he also holds “the conviction that without using animals in research we wouldn’t be able to make the advances in medical knowledge that have greatly improved human health.” As Mahoney sits on his ethical fence, he plays these conundrums against his saving of a newborn bush dog, Molly, an archetypal flea-bitten runt of the litter, with worms and eyes matted shut with pus, brought home from a vacation in Jamaica. But the story of Molly, warm and crisis-ridden and ultimately gratifying as it is, feels like a contrivance to demonstrate the extraordinary lengths Mahoney will go to for an animal, even as he sends others off for acute, terminal studies. Mahoney’s heart and soul are in suspension—he loves his primate charges, he kills his primate charges; even his gentling kindness doesn’t let him off the hook, and he knows it.
Pub Date: July 3, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-173-2
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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