Young Dr. Crichton (of The Andromeda Strain) uses five patients as a quod erat demonstrandum of procedures at Massachusetts General Hospital and as a work-up of the profession in general—the latter being what these enzymatic annals of applied medicine are generally about. The patients include a construction worker with a heart arrest; a man with a fever of 108 who for thirty days defies diagnosis but not the cure which nature effects; a man with a dangling hand; a woman on whom the new Tele-Diagnosis technique is used; and a victim of lupus erythematosus. Via these, Dr. Crichton ranges easily over problems of hospital costs (doubled in the last decade) and the A.M.A.'s anomie; the trend in which a facility such as this must cope with more and more acute emergencies (65,000 go through the Emergency Ward in a year); the newer rapprochement of surgery and medicine dealing as they do with the same tissue; the ward teaching system (and the medical student): the "traditional passivity" in the field and the exigencies of change: etc., etc. His book, as sharply, excitingly written as you might expect, is the best elective reading since Intern.
Pub Date: May 12, 1970
ISBN: 0099601117
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1970
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
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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