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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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