by Michael Lawrence-Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2018
Readers interested in African history or cardiac medicine will find this atmospheric, meticulously detailed personal opus...
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A debut autobiography chronicles the diverse life of an esteemed medical pioneer.
Lawrence-Brown, an innovative western Australia vascular surgeon, grew up in East Africa in a time demarcated by Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech signaling great upheaval in the British Empire. It was a time that heralded independence and republic change for countries like Kenya, where the author was born to a charismatic, fourth-generation colonial father who became a professional safari guide. The author’s mother was a former British navy veteran who felt lonely once her husband’s business blossomed thanks to the postwar economy and an influx of American tourists. Readers will get a proper history lesson on the region as Lawrence-Brown writes descriptively and authoritatively about local unrest due to rebellions against the British colonial regime and the many moves he and his family made to achieve safety and a quality education for him. The author’s exhaustive, predominantly anecdotal memoir moves smoothly through time to boarding school, high school with its strict rules, boyhood adventures climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and going on safaris, and the political turmoil leading to the end of Britain’s colonial rule that crushed his aspirations of studying overseas. Lawrence-Brown eventually went to Australia in 1965, seeking to further his education in surgical medicine, which became sandwiched between navigating a tricky new culture and dating and embracing commingled “flat life.” After years of creatively documented medical school study, the author writes proudly of finding his footing in surgical and vascular medicine: “I still wanted the bright lights of real surgery, and my path was set.” Lawrence-Brown ultimately gained great renown for inventive and groundbreaking research and clinical development, and he eventually married, though a medical scare found him in the operating theater as a patient. The author is most at home sharing the many anecdotes that proved formative in the shaping of his adolescent character as well as those integral to his success as a visionary surgeon working with the human aorta. With vivid characterization, florid prose, and dramatic flair, Lawrence-Brown offers stories of how helping ailing people became the cornerstone for many of his actions up to and including his development of the revolutionary stent graft for abdominal aortic aneurysms.
Readers interested in African history or cardiac medicine will find this atmospheric, meticulously detailed personal opus enticing, vastly informative, and entertaining.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984502-43-8
Page Count: 506
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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