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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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