After this auspicious start, one hopes that the good doctor will keep on writing. Highly recommended. A keeper.
This memoir by a country doctor Down Under is rife with memorable characters and odd happenings. And the reader gets a glimpse of semi-exotic Australia.
Debut memoirist Carter and his wife moved from their native England to Australia in the 1970s, settling in Melbourne. They tried to start a new, antipodean life after the death of their infant daughter, but the loss eventually killed the marriage. At a loss himself, Carter relocated farther into the countryside and found himself a harried country doctor (underscore “found himself”). Woongarra seems at times like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo: Not only do Carter and his dog, Hardy, have soulful conversations, but Carter has mixed “true life events with small doses of storytelling, and the final brew is a mix of many things that really took place and a few that definitely never did.” We meet Dave, filthy and homeless but an amazing musician; Phill (the second l is silent, he says), the gay waiter with the Carmen Miranda headgear; the prolific Gaggliano clan with their inedible sausages; Teddy and Michael, a gay couple with a gentle hospitality; and several others. Most chapters are humorous, but some are bittersweet and then some. We get the back story—thanks to Teddy’s prompting—of the death (SIDS?) of Carter’s daughter at 10 months. We get the brave story of twisted Isobel and the heartbreaking one of Eileen and Harold, for whom reconciliation comes too late. With Carter, we mourn Hardy’s death. And at book’s end, our hero has found a good woman to be his second wife (“Helen” in the book, Gillian in real life). Carter often gets his leg pulled or gets a bum rap for something not of his own making, but he is an innately cheerful, decent chap, and that shines through. The reader comes to like Doc Carter a lot; he is the antidote to Doc Martin of PBS fame. Carter is an impressively gifted tyro who understands fictional tricks better than many experienced practitioners of the craft.
After this auspicious start, one hopes that the good doctor will keep on writing. Highly recommended. A keeper.Pub Date: April 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499000122
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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