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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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