Harman comes across as a genuinely caring health professional, writes engagingly of her world and gives a frank picture of...
Captivating memoir of the trials and tribulations of a doctor-nurse team struggling to keep a small West Virginia women’s health center afloat and their 30-year marriage intact.
Harman, a nurse-midwife, and her husband, a gynecological surgeon, stopped delivering babies when payments for medical insurance became unaffordable, but they continued to offer first-trimester care and gynecological examinations. The women who donned a blue cotton gown in Harman’s examining room received far more than a pelvic exam; she listened to their personal problems and freely dispensed friendly, often motherly advice and lots of warm hugs. Among those patients were Kasmar, a middle-aged woman intent on becoming a man; Heather, an unwed teenager pregnant with twins who died in the womb; Shiana, a college student with a used condom stuck inside her; Nilla, a mother of seven with a sexually abused four-year-old daughter; and Trish, whose daughter had a baby with her drug-addicted boyfriend and then may or may not have killed herself. In the midst of these female troubles, the author underplays her own surgery for uterine cancer. Meanwhile, back at the office, accountants mishandled the practice’s financial affairs, debts mounted and letters from lawyers threatened malpractice suits. Her reliance on a middle-of-the-night shot of scotch as a sleep aid, hardly the approved medical remedy for insomnia, indicates the level of stress endured. Although she writes of her husband with a mix of respect, admiration, exasperation and love, he remains a rather vague figure in this world of women. Brief chapters tell of their early life together as hippies in a commune and her first experience helping with a home birth, which led her to become a certified nurse-midwife, but her focus is on the problem-filled present.
Harman comes across as a genuinely caring health professional, writes engagingly of her world and gives a frank picture of the pressures and strains of a husband-wife team running a small medical practice.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7289-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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