Bourke has done a fine job of detailing the story of pain and the folly it reveals. Sadly, the folly has not gone away.
A scholarly treatise on how pain and those who suffer from it have been regarded over the past three centuries in the Western world.
Bourke (History/Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; What It Means to Be Human: Historical Reflections from the 1800s to the Present, 2011, etc.) claims that pain should not be considered an objective entity but rather as a unique part of a person’s being. As such, there is always a context, history or cultural milieu that colors the individual’s unique experience. That setting is her focus as she plumbs the literature and includes copious quotes from philosophers and practitioners, preachers and patients. It is infuriating to read that the Christian position was that pain was punishment for original sin (plus others you accrued) and that you had better grin and bear it if you hoped for a better hereafter. Or how about the phrenologists’ discovery of a “destruction” bump, which gave them the power to amputate mercilessly rather than show any hesitancy born of compassion in the pre-anesthetic days? Attitudes changed with the advent of ether and chloroform in the 1840s, but what about class, education or gender? Women were considered more sensitive and emotional, while the lower classes and blacks were considered inferior and less sensitive to pain (a great comfort to slave owners). It was not until the 1960s that medical practice came around to recognizing that newborns and infants could feel pain. To be sure, there were always voices raised against conventional beliefs, and there have been critical advances in the neuroscience of pain. Bourke charts this progress, but the truth remains: Medical education on pain is severely deficient, and race and gender issues continue to prevail. Patients themselves can be their own worst enemies, fearing addiction or condemnation as a complainer.
Bourke has done a fine job of detailing the story of pain and the folly it reveals. Sadly, the folly has not gone away.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-968942-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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