Forget the made-up medical dramas on television; this is the real thing—gripping, powerful, and memorable.
A perceptive doctor’s harrowing account of life-and-death experiences in American ERs, a Nigerian clinic, a hospital in war-torn Bosnia, and a Kosovar refugee camp in Macedonia.
Grim, an emergency-medicine physician, draws most of her material from her ten years in inner-city hospital emergency rooms, where she and her colleagues, often working at fever pitch, sometimes succeed in saving individual lives. She reveals both what she’s thinking and what she’s feeling as she makes the most critical of decisions; while the technology and medical know-how are impressive in these dramas involving accidents, suicides, dying cops, and crack babies, even more so is her humanity. Her fast-paced stories make it crystal clear why burnout in her field is high: “too many cases of child abuse, sexual abuse, assaults, bad mothers and worse fathers, disastrous car wrecks, people dying who shouldn’t die, people alive only by some whim of God’s.” Burnout eventually drives her to join Doctors Without Borders, an international humanitarian organization, to help fight a meningitis breakout in sub-Saharan Nigeria. An acute observer and a compassionate doctor, Grim pulls no punches in her descriptions of the appalling situation she finds there. Similarly, her tales of attempting to treat war victims under impossible conditions are brutally realistic. While a weary Grim ponders the possibility of taking up the serene practice of boutique medicine (i.e., doing hair transplants and skin peels), at story’s end her medical future remains unclear. Readers can only hope she doesn’t stop writing.
Forget the made-up medical dramas on television; this is the real thing—gripping, powerful, and memorable.Pub Date: July 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52423-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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