A sobering, well-rendered reality check on the desperate need for advanced training on compassion-centric modes of patient...
A physician learns firsthand about the adverse aspects of the patient experience through her own catastrophic illness.
Detroit-based critical care physician Awdish began experiencing waves of abdominal pain and nausea while seven months pregnant with her first child and checked in at her workplace emergency department. Even before she was diagnosed and treated, she personally acknowledged the detachment patients often experience between themselves and the medical professionals charged with their clinical care, something she categorizes as an “unsettling, largely unspoken reality” in contemporary medicine. While she blames the conventional methodology of physician training, with its unwavering focus on disease diagnosis and distance to avoid burnout, she also recognizes that, as a doctor, she was in need of compassionate care training in order to connect with patients on more levels than directly pathological. “Despite completing my training,” she writes, “despite being surrounded by every form and severity of disease, I had yet to learn what it meant to be sick.” This, and further episodes of enlightenment, underpins the book’s core foundation. Awdish’s initially unknown malady eventually ballooned into an affliction of nightmarish proportions. Miraculously delivered from her deathbed, she survived internal bleeding, a stroke, liver tumors, and a heartbreaking miscarriage. Awdish also had to suffer the callous missteps and insensitive presuppositions made by hospital staff. Punctuated by descriptions of harrowing moments like waking up while on a mechanical respirator or developing hernias after surgeons applied quick stitches meant for an irremediable patient, the utter senselessness of illness reverberates throughout this carefully written chronicle of suffering and recovery. As the author returned to her livelihood as a humbled physician and grateful mother, she fully embodied and shared the knowledge that there could indeed be “reciprocity in empathy” in medicine.
A sobering, well-rendered reality check on the desperate need for advanced training on compassion-centric modes of patient care.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11921-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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