A thoroughly compelling message—without an ethical commitment to the value of every life, “the very humanity of our society”...
A beautifully written memoir about the author’s frustration with the transformation of the profession of medicine into the business of health care, and the unraveling of the doctor-patient bond.
As a leading psychiatrist, Wang has witnessed how “the insurance company has replaced the doctor as a patient’s primary medical relationship.” During her time as chief of the Psychiatry Consultation-Liaison Service at the University of New Mexico Hospital, her caseload was more than 1,000 new patients each year. She documents how this kind of pressure has been created by insurers with deep pockets who have driven independent doctors out of business by undercutting their fees, refusing to authorize necessary treatments and underpaying doctors for care that is authorized. In the 1990s, Wang welcomed the introduction of the new generation of anti-depressants. However, she soon realized that insurance companies would refuse to pay psychiatrists for treating patients with therapy—“Prozac, even at three dollars a pill, costs[s] far less than regular sessions with a highly trained psychotherapist.” Even though dedicated doctors work long hours at lower pay, tragically their efforts are undermined by profit-mad insurance companies, a transformation that began with the Reagan administration’s flawed argument that the free market would drive down escalating medical costs. The author recounts a number of tragic stories: e.g., a young woman in need of a second liver transplant who could not receive it because the facility where she was originally treated had closed down; an overworked physician so dedicated that she didn’t take time to get her own symptoms checked, and died suddenly of “acute complications of leukemia.” Even though Wang has recently cut back her practice in order to care for her young daughter, her commitment as a healer remains: “Every life is precious. Each life is worth our best effort. Each life lost is an alternate, possibly better world that didn’t happen.”
A thoroughly compelling message—without an ethical commitment to the value of every life, “the very humanity of our society” is at stake.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-753-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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