by Michael Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 1999
A well-told, enjoyable, enlightening—and much needed—biography of a giant of medical practice and education. William Osler (1849—1919) was a pastor’s son from rural Canada, the 8th of 9 children, who began his professional career as a pathologist; his career in medical teaching and clinical practice was eventually framed by stints at McGill, Johns Hopkins, and finally Oxford. By the time of his death, Osler was considered by colleagues and patients alike to be the greatest physician in the world; while at Hopkins he had revolutionized the clinical education of medical students; he wrote the groundbreaking text The Principles and Practice of Medicine, which finally went out of print in 1947, 16 editions later (and marked the last time such a wide-ranging tome had a single author), and was generally revered as the first great medical humanist. Osler’s previous biographer, the great neurosurgeon (and Osler contemporary) Cushing, delivered a plodding, admiring—and until now authoritative—account of Osler’s life and work in 1925. Medical historian Bliss (The Discovery of Insulin) here is able to sort through the mountains of material penned by Osler and his contemporaries to present a much more complete, clear-eyed, and ultimately admiring portrait of Osler, his work, and the times in which he lived. Bliss is able to sort out the cult-like devotion to Osler: In 1999, we can “rightly dismiss most of his medical writing as dated, of only historic or very specialized interest.” And yes, Bliss agrees, Osler can be viewed as a great medical humanist—’so long as it was remembered that the real Osler was also a rigorous disciple of science and the scientific method.” A clear picture of an extraordinarily curious, intelligent, kind, and humorous man emerges. Osler reportedly regretted that he wouldn’t be able to conduct his own post-mortem exam, “having taken such a lifelong interest in the case.” And along the way, readers will gain a clear picture of the Osler landscape: “the coming of modern medicine, the training of doctors . . . localism and holism in medical thought . . . feminism, humanism, science and the humanities, Victorianism, the rise of the United States, the North Atlantic cultural triangle” all come under Bliss’s lens. A first-rate biography of a towering medical influence.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512346-8
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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