Admiring, vivid portraits of a handful of veterinarians from Gutkind (Stuck in Time, 1993, etc.). Start with an obvious though essential point, suggests Gutkind: Veterinarians deal with patients who can't speak to them of their pains and worries. So vets, the good ones, have to communicate in other ways. They practice the ancient art of the laying on of hands, offering a gentle caress, a soft murmur, establishing a link that Gutkind finds missing in much human medicine: a devotion to the psychological well-being of the patient (though it might be argued that doctors of human medicine—the good ones, at any rate—haven't lost that touch). As Gutkind makes the rounds of various veterinary climes—from tony, high-fee Manhattan practices to mucky farms, from cutting-edge animal hospitals to zoos and exotic wildlife menageries—he encounters an extraordinary group of doctors, all of whom possess quick wits (on isolated farms, one must excel at improvisation when treating very sick patients), special diagnostic skills (animals often mask symptoms- -in the wild it is best to hide one's handicaps), and a shrewd awareness of the people, often superstitious or eccentric, in the picture. He tags along as the vets go about their tasks, watching as they repair a reindeer's hernia and diagnose a racehorse's displaced palate. He visits a village of HIV-infected chimps (they enjoy watching Geraldo on TV); he witnesses gut-wrenching scenes in ICUs; he mulls over the act of euthanasia and the question of whether vets should specialize or remain ``doctors for all seasons, all maladies, all species and breeds.'' Gutkind did his homework and has come away with a good story. His writing, while it can be dramatic, has the same soothing, inspiriting effect on the reader that a veterinarian—a good one- -has on a patient.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-3321-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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