An impressionistic portrait of Harvard Medical School that reveals the pluses and minuses of research-oriented medical education. Whether or not it's the number one medical school in the country—the point is arguable—Harvard Med is undeniably a prestigious and influential institution whose methods and results warrant examination. Journalist Langone (In the Shogun's Shadow, 1994, etc.) provides an occasionally awestruck, mostly anecdotal, rarely academic picture of the school, its teachers, and its students. Although he begins with orientation and ends with commencement, his approach is nonlinear: A chapter describing new students' first exposure to patients is followed by an account of how applicants are selected, which precedes a grisly account of dissecting a cadaver. Langone's research included taking the gross anatomy lab along with first-year students—an experience, he claims, that begins the hardening process that leads to arrogant and unfeeling doctors. Harvard Med, the author makes abundantly clear, is a training ground for medical scientists and specialists, not for general practitioners. It excels at teaching students to diagnose, treat, and research diseases. How to treat patients is a skill much harder to impart, and few at Harvard try, in Langone's view. He depicts a school that mirrors the best and worst features of America's health care system, giving Harvard an A+ in technology but a dismal grade in compassion. His chapters on the school's history, showing that it has made huge changes over time in its admission policies (in 1992 minorities were 22% of those admitted, women 45%) and in its teaching methods and subjects, suggest that Harvard Med will continue to evolve, but there is no indication that its plans include providing the kind of medical education that leads to empathetic healers. Strongly recommended for pre-med students, Harvard-bound or not.
Pub Date: June 30, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-59306-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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