A skillful blending of personal experience and public concerns.
What begins as a memoir of one man’s encounter with modern medicine expands into contemplation of the state of health care today.
Neugeboren (Transforming Madness, 1999, etc.) was told in 1999 that his coronary arteries were nearly 100 percent blocked and that he must immediately undergo bypass surgery. Fortunately, four of his close friends—Rich, a cardiologist; Phil, a neurologist; Jerry, an AIDS doctor; and Arthur, a psychologist—shepherded him through this crisis, making sure he got the best of care. Reflecting on the experience afterward, he concluded that while his surgical procedure depended on high technology, what made the difference between life and death was decidedly low-tech. His successful outcome, he asserts, was due in large part to the fact that he received the attention of doctors who knew him and listened to him. His opinion was confirmed about a year later when consulting two reputable New York urologists. The first never connected with him as a human being; the second paid attention to his concerns and answered his questions. For Neugeboren, who left the second doctor’s office feeling reassured and relieved even though this physician’s assessment of his condition was more serious, the crucial difference was that the first doctor practiced the impersonal science of medicine, while the second combined science with the art of medicine. That art, he warns, is often missing for many of us in our encounters with modern medicine. The author includes numerous excerpts from his own journals and long quotes from conversations with his four closely involved friends, who discuss not only the author’s particular case but the state of medicine today, how they came to choose their professions, and what they think about their work. In his examination of the healing arts, Neugeboren also draws on the books of numerous other thoughtful writers on medical matters, including Lewis Thomas, Sherwin Nuland, Gerald Grob, and Daniel Callahan.
A skillful blending of personal experience and public concerns.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-11211-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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