A compassionate portrait of a doctor’s quest to make a difference.
In this novel set in 1973, a cancer doctor, who’s struggling with feelings of futility, reluctantly agrees to treat an 11-year-old girl.
Oncologist Willie Mays “Bernie” Bernstein doesn’t take children as patients. He treats adult cancers with the tools and knowledge that are available, and it tests the limits of his hope and resilience. His temper flares, stress tightens his chest, and he drinks too much. “Most patients die. When they live, who knows why?” he muses. “Shit. It’s all a waste of time.” Still, when head nurse Jessica Coles—who took Bernie under her wing when he was just starting out—asks him to see her young granddaughter Anna Bing, who’s suffering from Hodgkin’s disease, he can’t say no. Sorting out the girl’s treatment will require him to think differently about cancer and break some rules. In this, he’s supported by his open, loving family. As he waits to see the effects of his risky, experimental regimen, he comes to see the importance of maintaining a realistic yet positive outlook. In his debut novel, Derechin—a retired physician whose specialties were oncology and hematology—nicely captures the frustrations of a doctor who’s keenly aware of his limitations. Bernie is a well-balanced character, neither Dr. Schweitzer nor Dr. House. His warm, chaotic little household zoo of family, pets, and friends mirrors his own nature; he’s a man who’s willing to ski through a snowstorm to get to his patients. Some of the book’s insights about cancer treatment that were new in the 1970s are well-accepted today, such as prioritizing pain relief over the risk of addiction. Others are still controversial, for example the idea that patients’ attitudes make all the difference—a view reflected today in many positive-thinking approaches for cancer sufferers: “He’s just not a quitter,” says the wife of a prostate-cancer patient; “I feel people pick the time to die,” agrees Bernie. Readers who’ve seen determined people die of cancer, though, may strongly disagree.
A compassionate portrait of a doctor’s quest to make a difference.Pub Date: July 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491727904
Page Count: 166
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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