A window into an unfamiliar world where excellence is difficult to achieve yet absolutely essential.
Close-up and personal view of a surgical team at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases.
Ruhlman, who previously explored excellence in craft at the Culinary Institute of America (The Making of a Chef, 1997) and at a Martha’s Vineyard boatyard (Wooden Boats, 2001), shifts his attention to a field where highly developed skill can make the difference between life and death. The author focuses on Dr. Roger Mee, regarded as a man who can “walk on water,” one of the best in his field, and his associates on the surgical team at the Cleveland Clinic, where they daily repair the malformed hearts of babies. Ruhlman was allowed into the operating room to observe intricate procedures being performed on newborn infants undergoing open-heart surgery. To understand what he was seeing, he conducted extensive interviews with doctors, nurses, and physicians’ assistants. To round out his story, he questioned team members to get their personal stories (and their assessments of one another); he also interviewed the anxious parents of the infants whose problems had brought them to the clinic. Dramatic moments abound as unexpected complications cascade into narrowly averted disasters and last-minute heart transplants, and at these moments the expertise that Rulhman admires becomes most apparent. Yet frequently the narrative gets bogged down and the action blurred by overuse of medical terminology (e.g., “residual ventricular septal defect”) and by technical details of more interest to a surgeon-in-training than a layperson. In addition to revealing the prowess of the surgical team at Cleveland, Ruhlman provides a brief history of pediatric heart surgery and presents a disturbing view of the politics of cardiology referrals. Finally, a resource section offers advice for parents faced with making decisions about the care of a child with a congenital heart defect.
A window into an unfamiliar world where excellence is difficult to achieve yet absolutely essential.Pub Date: April 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03201-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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
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