A somewhat bitter pill but a vital prescription for readers who want to know what really goes on in the critical-care ward.
Siegel, a doctor, uses fiction (inspired by an actual case he encountered as an internist) to air fetid linen in the medical profession.
Dr. Charlie White tries to do his best for a severely ill woman, but he fears her own brother seeks her death, assisted by a dysfunctional hospital culture. The setting is a Florida hospital, where White’s last-angry-man first-person narration tends to paint him as one of the few decent, compassionate individuals left practicing the healing arts. A somewhat scrambled flashback structure opens with the emergency admission of longtime patient Agnes Wellborne, felled by a stroke, among other serious medical issues. Short, bracing chapters recall memories of White’s work with the Wellborne family, chiefly the chronically ill Agnes, her sister, Marion, and their brother, Harris, a coldblooded lawyer who will inherit the estate if he survives his siblings. As Marion languishes in the background, suffering a mysterious environmental poisoning, Agnes, good-hearted wife and mother but a lifelong smoker with commensurate ailments, is hospitalized again and again, at one point facing a misdiagnosis of colon cancer; only Dr. White’s intercession prevents grueling, unnecessary therapy. In the present crisis, Harris seems eager for Agnes to receive all possible treatment, but White suspects the lawyer banks on the health care establishment’s own pathology—inexperienced EMTs, a vainglorious ICU physician, conceited and do-nothing surgeons—to ensure Agnes dies in a prolonged, hideous life-support ordeal. The situation brings White to an extreme crisis of conscience. Though the tale occasionally and jaggedly runs into mystery/crime-thriller territory—with characters who sometimes have only enough attributes to illustrate a painful point Siegel is trying to make—the novel has the voice of a medical insider who has firsthand knowledge and an urgent need to share his highly critical clinical chart. Several pages of footnotes and a glossary of terms will help readers see through the jargon.
A somewhat bitter pill but a vital prescription for readers who want to know what really goes on in the critical-care ward.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495460685
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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