A thoughtful message, movingly yet unsentimentally presented by a physician alert to medicine’s human as well as its...
Doctor/author Groopman (Second Opinions, 2000, etc.) insightfully examines the nature of hope and the role it plays in recovery from illness.
Stories from his medical education and 30 years of practice reveal what New Yorker staff writer Groopman (Medicine/Harvard) has learned about the connections between hope and illness. He was still in medical school when an Orthodox Jewish woman confided in him that she believed her cancer was a punishment from God. “Well prepared for the science [but] pitifully unprepared for the soul,” Groopman was unable to reach out and give her the hope she needed to pursue a course of therapy. Then, as a young resident, he followed an older doctor’s lead in offering false hope to a terminally ill woman, a disturbing experience that subsequently led him to veer too far in the direction of hope-crushing cold facts as a specialist in oncology and hematology. Perhaps the most powerful story Groopman tells is about a professor of pathology who, in full possession of all the grim facts about his stomach cancer, nevertheless held onto hope, persisted in excruciating therapy, and survived. From his patients, the author observed that hope is at the very heart of healing, whether it derives from faith in God and belief in an afterlife or from a personal philosophy that gives meaning to life and mortality. The author’s personal experience of pain, frustration, and despair was also instructive. After suffering severe back pain for 19 years, Groopman followed the advice of a physician to seek relief by changing his beliefs about pain and acting on those new beliefs. Experiencing for himself the physical changes caused by regained hope, he began to question neurologists, experimental psychologists, and others about the biology of hope. He relates their discoveries here, going on to consider why some people can sustain hope but others cannot and clearly delineating the difference between false hope and true hope.
A thoughtful message, movingly yet unsentimentally presented by a physician alert to medicine’s human as well as its scientific side.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50638-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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