Highly animated—and rich in encounters both sad and hilarious.
An orthopedic surgeon’s down-to-earth, fast-paced, and frequently funny memoir of his residency.
Collins admits he felt like “the dullest scalpel in the drawer” at the start of his time at the Mayo Clinic, he admits. In short, punchy chapters he chronicles his four-year journey from terrified junior resident to skilled chief resident. Although Collins notes that surgeons are not generally known for their introspective qualities (and his memoir reflects that), he nonetheless freely describes the emotions he felt making his first incision into a living body, witnessing his first patient death, and conducting his first solo operation. As he grew in competence, he grew in confidence. Surgeons fix things, and for a time Collins rejoiced in the ability to do that increasingly well. He thrived on the gratitude and admiration of patients whose bones he had set or whose joints he had replaced. But he came to realize that it wasn’t in his power to fix everything, a point made in the stories of a young woman whose cancer could not be halted despite extremely disfiguring surgery and of a boy whose horribly mangled leg Collins failed to save. In other pieces, the surgeon touches on the ethics of the residency system, in which the patient’s right to the best care conflicts with the resident’s need to learn. While much of the action takes place at the Mayo Clinic, Collins also shares his personal life. With his wife producing a baby each year, he had to take a second job as an emergency-room doctor to feed his growing family. One old car after another died, each replaced by an equally aging wreck. The subzero Minnesota winters vied with perennial lack of sleep as worst physical indignity. Throughout, Collins depicts with a born storyteller’s skill the camaraderie among young residents as they journey to medical professionalism. We see them together in and out of the hospital, joshing, competing, and supporting each other.
Highly animated—and rich in encounters both sad and hilarious.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33778-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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