A graphic, sometimes gruesome account of the training, both theoretical and hands-on, that Loretta Gage (coauthor Nancy Gage, her sister, is a freelance writer) received during her four-year stint at veterinary school. When Gage began attending Colorado State University's College of Veterinary Medicine in 1985, she was, she says, one of the most insecure students in class—but also one of the most determined. A 34-year-old, two-time divorcÇe with little in the way of financial resources, she had set out to fulfill her childhood ambition of becoming a vet. She and her classmates faced the arduous task of intensive study and memorization, long hours, and continual personal sacrifice—all the while withstanding humiliation by bullying professors. And they learned the necessity of hardening their hearts as they euthanized healthy animals (many of them racetrack castoffs) and cut them open for surgical practice, or stitched up animals maimed solely for learning purposes. Gages's ambivalence about the ethics of such training methods ``was a war that would rage all through vet school and on into the practice of veterinary medicine.'' There are personal accounts here, too, which help break up the academic material: Gage's failed relationship with a blacksmith; her successful one with a stray cat she adopted; and the loss of her best friend, Laura, who died unexpectedly while Gage was away at school. Well intentioned, but Gage is no James Herriot, and this may appeal primarily to those interested in the field of veterinary medicine.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-08817-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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