A sensitive doctor describes her beginnings navigating the unpredictable, woolly world of modern American health care.
Pearson’s inspired collective of illuminating clinical episodes immediately sparks to life with anecdotes from her early work in a female-owned and -operated abortion clinic in her 20s. Her experience there as a young, bilingual patient advocate counseling Spanish-speaking women greatly broadened her perspective on women’s issues, “the suffering that women go through,” and it solidified her decision to pursue a career in medicine. Because many of the artfully and creatively compressed stories she shares are so personal and admittedly “hard to tell,” the book takes on an intimate tone, even while the details veer toward the gruesome or the emotionally raw. Intensive medical school classes on Galveston Island led to hospital and family medicine rotations, and all of the experiences exposed the author to the trauma and heartbreak of pain, cancer, and disease and the frustrations of age and death—but also the sincere appreciation from those she was fortunate enough to assist in creating wellness. Pearson’s history as a poet and a fiction writer aids with the flow and the tone of her memoir. Eloquently and briskly written, the narrative is moving and will be inspirational and particularly enlightening for pre-med students eager to discover and explore the real insider details found both in and out of school. The author offers a helpful, pragmatic perspective on how the American health care system operates, how and who it helps, and what it has become hobbled by, though, disappointingly, only a few closing pages are devoted to these thoughts. On the whole, Pearson’s well-balanced book provides a smooth combination of personal history and patient care cases.
Educative and thoughtful—important reading for patients and fellow medical professionals alike.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-24924-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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