by Peter A. Selwyn ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1998
A moving personal account of a doctor's discoveries about himself as he struggled to care for his dying AIDS patients. In 1981, when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning, Selwyn, newly graduated from Harvard Medical School, joined the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx as an intern in family medicine, later becoming medical director of its drug-abuse treatment program. For nearly ten years, his only patients were the HIV-infected, mostly intravenous drug users and their sexual partners and children. Surrounded by dying young men, widows, and orphaned children with whom he found himself making deep connections, Selwyn began to explore his own history and eventually to come to terms with it. His father had died in a mysterious fall from a window when Selwyn was an infant, his apparent suicide a family secret. Selwyn came to see parallels between the stigma of AIDS and the stigma of suicide, between the drug addiction of his patients and his own addiction to work. The stories of five patients had special resonance for him: Nelson, with his idealized family; pregnant Milagro, bent on a path of unalterable self-destruction; Delia, whose infant child would soon be orphaned; Javon, determined to leave his son a legacy; and Betty, with her irrepressible zest for life. Selwyn is led to explore his grief and sense of loss in Kubler-Ross workshops, press his family for information about his father, recover his father's ashes, and finally to visit the site of his death. Going through fear, pain, and darkness, says Selwyn, is a prerequisite to becoming an effective caregiver, as he comes to see the physician's primary role not as an all-powerful conqueror of illness but as a companion to those going though an illness and as a witness to their suffering. Poignant revelations from the heart of a physician.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07126-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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