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
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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