Disarming tales from a frontier doctor, an appealing old coot who actually considers himself a mere mortal. The year is 1949. Young Dr. Ron Losee has piled his wife and child into an army-surplus jeep and pointed it at Ennis, Mont., a wee burg hard by the foot of the Tobacco Root Range. What follows are the trials and tribulations of a GP forced to handle all manner of catastrophes, large and small, with a wing and a prayer and a sharp knife. Losee has a smart take on his profession: ``Doctoring should not be a business, and I think that the surgeon who operates needlessly, as it were, possesses the morality of a rapist.'' He charges each incident with enough drama to draw the reader in like blood to a cotton swab. Fractures are set; hot appendixes snipped; laryngectomies, stitchings, lancings, and bilateral castrations performed; an arm removed with a hacksaw. His theater of operations is an army cot illuminated by an old car headlight. His mistakes and failures are confessed and serve to humanize him; so do his wrenching losses, as when a child dies, and her father, dazed and confused, begs the nurse not to throw the body out with the trash. For a break, Losee shuttles off to Montreal to attend a residency in orthopedic surgery. He returns to Ennis, now with a hospital of its own, and starts to specialize in knee work, gaining a modest reputation in the process. Most of the stories hereafter revolve around lateral, medial, and cruxial ligaments, but the humor shines right through all the bloody tissue. Get this guy to a biochemist and have him cloned. As a memoirist, he's just fine; as a physician, we could use a few more thousand just like him. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1994
ISBN: 1-55821-323-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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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