A sometimes disjointed memoir revealing the demons plaguing both the physician and the medical community in which he served.
With a blend of memoir and exposé, Deaton (Two Hands Full of Sunshine, 2009, etc.) struggles to make peace with the patient who forever changed his life and career.
The majority of Deaton’s memoir—the first in a trilogy detailing his life as a physician—is devoted to his post–Great Depression childhood in a small Texas town. Born to an alcoholic, absent father and an emotionally distant mother, Deaton spent much of his childhood alone. Despite a dysfunctional home life, he found inspiration in the teachers and mentors who provided him with the necessary tools to succeed in life. To Deaton’s credit, his introspective nature allows him to recognize the value of these adult guardians, evidenced by the gratitude he expresses with unselfconscious sincerity. Juxtaposed with these memories—which are presented in no particular chronological order—is the story of Maria Chavarria, a 17-year-old patient Deaton met as an intern during his ob-gyn rotation at Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital. As a freshly minted M.D., Deaton began his internship anticipating he’d become the kind of physician he admired as a child, but he soon discovers medicine’s dark side. Deaton’s writing reveals the depth of his passion. The events leading up to Maria’s wholly preventable death are recounted with surgical precision, yet Deaton never loses sight of his patient’s humanity. The most dramatic passages describe the inner turmoil wrought upon the author by this tragedy of medicine. No one is treated with kid gloves in this book, including Deaton. Empathy and sensitivity are directed toward his patient, while the outrage is directed toward those the author holds responsible. Genuinely profound insights can be found throughout this memoir, and the author’s explanation of the power dynamics behind medical care is positively brilliant. If Deaton fails anywhere, it’s in tying the two disparate story lines together, but there’s no question he’s an excellent writer.
A sometimes disjointed memoir revealing the demons plaguing both the physician and the medical community in which he served.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5526-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2012
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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