Inspiring memoirs of a remarkable physician whose dedication to helping the homeless has changed the face of health care in Miami. Winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, Greer, aided here by a Pulitzer-winning journalist at the Miami Herald, tells of his pledge, made on the sudden death of his young sister, never to let any one die or suffer alone. A Cuban who was born in the US by chance, he seems to moves easily between the worlds of Anglo and Spanish, rich and poor, powerful and helpless. In 1984, the lonely death of a local homeless man sent Greer, then an intern at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, looking for the man’s family. The search led him to Camillus House, a shelter for the homeless, where he soon set up a tiny free walk-in clinic. At risk to his own safety, Greer scoured the mudflats under the bridges and highways to tell alcoholics, drug addicts, and other down-and-outers living there in crates and boxes about his free clinic and persuade them to come in for treatment. With furnishings and supplies and medicines scavenged by the resourceful Greer and care provided by fellow volunteers, the Camillus House clinic thrived and eventually grew to a multistory center named after Greer’s dead sister. Greer acquired an education in raising funds and applying for grants, and he soon opened other clinics in Little Havana and in South Dade migrant labor camps. By 1991, the intrepid Greer had become the first assistant dean of homeless education at the University of Miami School of Medicine, with rotations of medical students staffing the clinics. Sharp in its indictment of profit-hungry HMOs that sign up homeless patients for their Medicaid-paid fees but don—t serve them, hospital administrators who refuse admission to the under- or uninsured, and out-of-touch Washington policymakers, Greer’s text offers spirited testimony to the difference one committed individual can make
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-83547-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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