An amusing and genuine account of the challenges a surgeon faces in a new country.
In this third installment of a memoir, an English doctor and his family adjust to life in Canada.
Case, his wife, and their young children immigrated to Alberta in 1970. They quickly got a taste of this new rural setting, as their arrival in Canada was in the midst of winter. The family didn’t have clothing to accommodate the blistering minus-35-degree Fahrenheit temperature (or money to buy more) and generally stayed inside their town house. But Alberta was different from their England home in many other ways, from diverse cultures and languages to the food. Alas, black pudding was no longer a breakfast option. One of the family’s earlier troubles was monetary; Case, who earned a surgical specialist certification in Canada, initially made less than he did in England. But the Cases became financially stable once he opened an independent practice, and they settled into a new home. The vastness of Alberta provided the surgeon with a variety of patients and injuries, largely due to heavy industry and icy roads that caused numerous accidents. And as it turned out, the family’s original plan of “a couple of years” in Canada was extended. In this volume following The Surgeon’s Apprentice (2019), Case couples descriptive prose with welcome humor. Some of his adjustments, for example, included coping with slang (the British phrase knocked up is an early morning call). At the same time, he cites and scrupulously details myriad surgical cases and procedures. In fact, readers who are squeamish watching surgeries on TV may react comparably to the book’s graphic passages. Despite the family’s hardships, the work is upbeat, portraying Canada as a serene, snowy place with good people. Further enhancing Case’s memoir is intermittent poetry that’s earnest and sometimes funny, like a piece warning drivers to watch the road—not “ogle” the snowy owl.
An amusing and genuine account of the challenges a surgeon faces in a new country. (acknowledgements)Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5255-6030-9
Page Count: 354
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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