Attempts to merge holistic healing and modern high-tech medicine are not new, but the perspective of a Navajo woman surgeon makes this very personal account unique. The title objects, a surgeon’s tool and a Navajo fetish, symbolize the two worlds that Alvord inhabits and whose values she seeks to unite. Now an associate dean at Dartmouth College, she writes discerningly of growing up poor on a New Mexico reservation and of learning about her people’s ways from her shinaalii, or Navajo grandmother. The culture shock she experiences as a Dartmouth undergraduate and the conflict between her Navajo upbringing and the demands of Stanford medical school (Navajos traditionally avoid touching and eye contact, and touching a dead body is strictly taboo) are made painfully clear. By the time she returns to New Mexico as a surgeon at Gallup Indian Medical Center, Alvord has learned to be white. However, her experiences treating Indian patients there and her awareness of the shortcomings of impersonal, high-tech specialty medicine soon draw her to Navajo ways of healing. She attends traditional healing ceremonies, finds a comforting way to talk to patients, and works to create an atmosphere of harmony in her operating room. She explains the Navajo philosophy of illness as a lack of balance or harmony in any part of life—one’s mind, body, spirit, family, friends, community, or the environment—and the role of a native healer, or hataalii, in restoring that balance. Tony Hillerman fans will find much that is familiar here. Alvord’s own visit to a hataalii late in her troubled first pregnancy provides one of the book’s most memorable scenes. At her story’s end, she leaves New Mexico for New Hampshire, eager to share with Dartmouth medical students a truly holistic approach to healing and wellness based on the ancient principles of her native people. A voice from another quarter speaks knowingly of modern medicine’s discontent with itself.
Pub Date: June 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10012-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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