Not for the squeamish, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into a world of rapid life-or-death decisions and actions.
From the chief of trauma at Tucson’s University Medical Center, where Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was taken after the mass shooting in 2011, comes a memoir filled with explicit details about repairing horrific damage to human bodies.
Rhee, who is also a professor of surgery at the University of Arizona, is aided by veteran journalist Dillow in recounting a life rich in dramatic moments. Born in South Korea and raised partly in Uganda and then in the United States, Rhee, who received his medical education at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and consequently served in the U.S. Navy, discovered his bent for surgery as a resident. He loved it, and he had “good hands.” What his memoir shows is that he also had stamina, drive, ingenuity, and the ability to focus and to lead. Having been a trauma surgeon in the “urban battlefields” of Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, Rhee has seen sights most people never will—or would ever want to. But this is not just a series of horror stories. The author wants readers to understand the importance of trauma centers—trauma is the major cause of death of all Americans under the age of 45—the training of trauma surgeons, and what they do and do not do. Rhee opens and closes the book with the story of Giffords, but what he makes clear is that what happened in Tucson was not unusual or remarkable. Every year, some 180,000 Americans die of traumatic injuries, and the ones who end up under the care of a skilled trauma team stand the best chances of surviving.
Not for the squeamish, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into a world of rapid life-or-death decisions and actions.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2729-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
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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