An often insightful memoir about the human side of medicine, from a physician who’s still willing to learn.
A cardiologist shares a wealth of experiences from his 50 years of practice.
Nathan doesn’t just treat people’s hearts; he also puts his heart into his work. In these 45 short anecdotes, he tells about his years as a physician in India, England and America. He eventually settled in Florida, and for the last few decades, he’s tended to the special needs of the elderly. In the first section, “The Art of Medicine,” readers get a glimpse into Nathan’s character when he quotes a few comforting lines from the Bhagavad-Gita to a sick patient, including “Don’t grieve for the living or the departed.” He often returns to the theme of treating patients with compassion, although he believes that patients’ distrust of doctors has increased over the years. Some of the prose is a bit mechanical and choppy (“Mr. Dugan, a sixty-five-year-old somewhat obese businessman, recently retired, and he moved to my hometown, Brooksville”), and it includes many undefined medical terms, such as hepatomegaly and amebiasis. However, Nathan’s authenticity and humanity shine through as he candidly tells of lessons he’s learned from his own clinical and personal experiences, including his own heart attack and kidney transplant. Although a few snippets lack drama, most offer a peek into a world that many readers are unfamiliar with; he shares his frustration at being sued, for example, and tells of how he must constantly balance the delicate relationships among the patient, the patient’s family and the insurance company. He also writes that he feels that his learning is never complete. He includes absorbing stories about a prominent surgeon friend who succumbed to Alzheimer’s; a 23-year-old AIDS patient who asked to be taken off her respirator; and a simple prank among friends that led to death. The book also discusses the differences between India’s and America’s medical practice; in India, Nathan says, doctors still make house calls, as many people avoid the hospital, believing it’s where people go to die. Overall, the author’s sincerity and humility give this varied collection tremendous appeal.
An often insightful memoir about the human side of medicine, from a physician who’s still willing to learn.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484053584
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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