A sometimes-engaging thriller that’s hampered by some clunky moments.
Perry (REAP 23, 2017, etc.), a cardiologist, takes a scalpel to the issue of medical malpractice in this medical and legal thriller.
Readers may think twice about heading to the emergency room after finishing this tale of a dedicated physician who gets caught up in multiple lawsuits after the death of one of his patients. In 2004, Sarah Thompson, a 30-something single mom, is admitted to a Salt Lake City, Utah, hospital with a mysterious heart condition. Hugh Harrison, one of the state’s leading cardiologists, takes charge of her care. But as he heads off for a weekend trip, he hands her off to his egotistical colleague Stan Blackstone, who promptly adjusts the course of her treatment. Days later, she’s dead. This tragedy leads Thompson’s distraught family to file suit against Harrison. His legal problems are compounded by another case involving his ouster from the cardiovascular clinic he co-founded—and where Blackstone still works. Throw in some shady dealings involving that clinic and the local hospital system, and you have the makings of an engrossing, if overly complicated, drama. Perry’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach weighs the novel down, and the jumble of subplots, such as those involving Harrison’s love life and Thompson’s loser ex-husband, can be confusing. The arrogant Blackstone and hospital executives, who care more about profit than patients, are painted in cartoonishly broad strokes, with dialogue that comes off as unintentionally comic at times: “It is my mission to destroy this man,” Blackstone declares at one point; “I love eating not-for-profits,” proclaims another character as he strategizes about ways to make a competing hospital go under. However, the central story, about a grieving family and a well-meaning doctor stymied by a dysfunctional health care system, still packs an emotional punch. The scenes in which Sarah’s elderly father deals with the loss of his daughter and struggles to care for his granddaughter, who has Down syndrome, highlight the real lives behind the legal wrangling.
A sometimes-engaging thriller that’s hampered by some clunky moments.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4809-8977-1
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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