A passionate account about medical care written with dexterity throughout.
In this memoir, a retired physician shares four decades of joys and agonies as a practitioner and consumer of Canadian health care.
In 1978, Zehr was a nurse at a hospital in Yellowknife, the capital city of Canada’s Northwest Territories region, which served all the Inuit and Dene Indigenous settlements in the area. During a frantic case when she assisted in saving the life of a 6-month-old baby, she recognized an intense desire to pursue a career as a doctor. Even as a child growing up as the eldest of three in Ontario, the author, an enthusiastic learner, knew she wanted to be in a “helping profession” in a “clinical and hands-on” industry. She fondly recalls her mother alleviating her stressful younger years with long walks and talks as well as instilling in her an early appreciation for music, particularly an enduring love for Paul McCartney and the Beatles, a passion that would last a lifetime. Zehr’s career track involved years of registered nurse training in the 1970s, which she generously shares in chapters filled with anecdotal episodes featuring a panoply of pediatric patients, alternating between sad and complex and cheerful and gratifying cases. These vivid stories—and the accompanying family photographs of life on northern Canada’s Arctic tundra—drive home the critical importance of the nursing profession and demonstrate the mettle necessary to succeed as well as the rewarding nature of work in medicine. Medical school would test her resilience and patience as she went on to become an OB-GYN, including performing part of her residency at a controversial abortion clinic. Zehr is candid about physician burnout and how some doctors never notice the negative changes occurring in their own bodies due to mental stress and sheer exhaustion. The well-written memoir’s concluding chapters concern the author not as a medical professional but as a patient and health care consumer, forced to personally wrestle with the system’s inadequacies and frustrations. This segment is as real as it gets and unpacks a great amount of disillusionment and exasperation with an industry Zehr had enjoyed a bittersweet relationship with. Readers interested in knowing how health care operates outside of America will be fascinated by the author’s opinions and ordeals.
A passionate account about medical care written with dexterity throughout.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 9781039143876
Page Count: 265
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
