While not rich in the sort of raw humor, pathos, embarrassments or revelatory moments that characterize so many med-school...
A straightforward, somewhat impersonal account of becoming a neurosurgeon, fleshed out with observations on ethical issues and predictions about possible future advances in the field.
One of the few women neurosurgeons in the United States, Firlik kept notes during her recent post-medical-school training, which consisted of one year as an intern, two as a junior resident, three as a senior resident and then a final year as a chief resident. Her subtitle not withstanding, she advises that neurosurgeons do not call themselves brain surgeons, for it is spines, not brains, that the majority spend most of their time operating on. However, brains are a far more intriguing subject, and her memoir focuses on her experiences working with brain injuries, aneurysms, tumors, hemorrhages and various congenital anomalies. Describing a neurosurgeon as part scientist and part mechanic, she provides a revealing look at the tools of the trade—drills, picks, suctions—and of acquiring the skills to use them. There are, of course, some horror stories—one involving maggots being the most nauseating—some happy endings and some hopeless cases. She gives the reader glimpses of a neurosurgeons’ convention and of a hospital’s weekly morbidity and mortality conference, and she distinguishes clearly between the roles of neurosurgeons and doctors in allied fields. Although she includes some biographical details (e.g., her childhood with a surgeon father, her marriage to a fellow neurosurgeon), what is missing is a real sense of who Firlik is as a person—her surgeon’s mask seems always firmly in place.
While not rich in the sort of raw humor, pathos, embarrassments or revelatory moments that characterize so many med-school memoirs, this provides an abundance of information helpful to anyone contemplating a career in neurosurgery.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6320-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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