Bold and educative.
Dr. Magliato describes the rewards and challenges of being a cardiothoracic surgeon, a profession that demands skill, endurance, toughness and compassion in equal measure.
Heart surgery, writes the author, is “the biggest boys club of them all.” A 46-year-old mother of two who received her qualification ten years ago, Magliato is blunt about the challenges she has faced. She explains how she and her surgeon husband juggle the demands of their 24/7 careers and child care, and she acknowledges the existence of sexual harassment in the hospital. “[S]exism is alive and well in the field of medicine,” she writes. “Ask any female doctor. It’s our dirty little secret.” The author has had to fight discrimination at every step of her career, beginning with her first days as an intern in general surgery, when she assisted in a heart operation and held a living heart in her hand. “My mind was reeling with the possibility that I could touch the human heart every day,” she writes. “What an incredible honor and privilege.” In addition to addressing the difficulties facing women in her field, Magliato is a vocal advocate for women as patients. Because women have different symptoms than men, she writes, their heart disease is frequently not recognized until it is too late. In fact, “in a survey done a mere four years ago, fewer than one in five physicians recognized that more women die of heart disease than men each year, and among primary care physicians, only 8 percent knew this fact.” Magliato is a courageous, successful doctor with admirable goals and an impressive résumé. Though her writing could use some polish, her story is inspiring.
Bold and educative.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7679-3026-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
