Perfect graduation gift for a pre-med major, or even a bright young bricklayer.
In a prequel to his skillful memoir of his residency days, Hot Lights, Cold Steel (2005), orthopedic surgeon Collins reflects on his life before and during medical school.
The author opens with a portrait of his 24-year-old self, a beer-guzzling Irish Catholic construction worker in Chicago who spent his days throwing broken slabs of concrete into a truck. After deciding that he wanted to do something more noble with his life, he quickly discovered that becoming a doctor took a different kind of hard work—specifically, two years of tough science courses before he could even apply to medical school. But Collins accepted the challenge and gained entrance to Loyola University School of Medicine in Chicago. The first year, he reports, was a dry, sterile time when students were asked only to memorize facts, but not to analyze why. Despite what his professors claimed, watching an autopsy did not reveal the secrets of life. As the author describes it, beginning students were given the mechanics of medicine but not its spirit. Collins ably conveys the excitement and uncertainty of a second-year student grappling for the first time with practical chores, and he writes movingly of his painful experiences with patients—a badly burned infant, a woman dying of cancer—and of his reactions to the cynicism of some older physicians. As in his first memoir, the author shares hilarious details of his personal life, his loving but disrespectful brothers—“I make the mistake of mentioning to my brothers that I’m thinking about becoming a doctor. Denny says that’s interesting because he’s thinking about becoming Pope. Tim says he’s thinking about becoming a boxer and kicking Muhammad Ali’s ass”—and especially his courtship of the remarkably patient Patti, their marriage and the birth of their first child. Collins has a superb ear for dialogue, and his breezy style makes his world spring to life. What lingers, though, is the humanity.
Perfect graduation gift for a pre-med major, or even a bright young bricklayer.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-53293-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
