As the cold certainty of heartbreak surrounds her, Weir’s sharp honesty begets the doctor’s best friend: trust.
An eviscerating chronicle of life as a pediatric resident in two dissimilar Boston hospitals.
It is not easy to like Weir at the beginning of the book. She does not deign to edit her responses to what were often dire circumstances, and she writes with greater deliberation than she displayed on the ward. On the page, she lets her emotions flow exactly as they did at any particular moment, informed by her education or anger about extremely difficult scenarios, such as the tiny premature baby with multiple complications whom she would have let go, his present and future so hopeless, but whose parents refused to surrender. Or the parents who “ask questions for the sake of asking them, to feel involved, much as children do when they are three or four.” Or the teenagers, “with their propensity for sullenness and outright lies, their inability to state in any simple and straightforward terms what was bothering them and why they needed to see a doctor.” Slowly, without making a show of it, Weir demonstrates that she is simply being fair to her understanding of each situation. She never gives any less than her best, but a resident’s workload is impossibly punishing and the situations wretched. She not only gathers the medical talent that may cure a life-threatening problem, but she shows the ineffable will to push through the fugue states and existential despair, a misery testified by another resident during a review session: “It would have been helpful if someone had told us ahead of time that all the Onc kids were going to die.” Readers will weep at points, but, without guile or fanfare, the author also presents many instances of tenderness.
As the cold certainty of heartbreak surrounds her, Weir’s sharp honesty begets the doctor’s best friend: trust.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8907-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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