A straightforward and uplifting story of helping others through earnest Christian faith.
A burn unit doctor’s account of healing and transformation.
Fratianne, an emeritus professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University and the founder of the burn center at Cleveland’s MetroHealth Medical Center, combines his experiences as a physician with his unfolding faith journey as a Christian in this debut, crafting a narrative that centers on the concept of personal development: “Most of us never fully know or appreciate the person we can become,” he writes. “We do not fully explore our potential; our gifts and our talents or our qualities as human beings.” Fratianne and his team, which he calls his “extended family,” have treated many patients with pain and long-term trauma from serious burn injuries. In some ways, he says, the most challenging injuries are those to a victim’s sense of self. He notes how patients with scarred skin or deformed features felt afraid that they would be objects of pity or ridicule when they rejoined society. The stress of dealing with this brought Fratianne to the edge of quitting his job, but at this point in his story, he recounts a personal spiritual awakening—a sense that God was urging him to love his patients despite the enormity of their needs. His first response to God, he writes, was “I can’t. I can’t. They need too much; much more than I can give.” The author employs a highly effective blend of autobiography and spiritual manifesto in these pages, revealing how transforming the lives of others became possible by using what he calls the “supernatural gifts” of faith, hope, and love. The religious elements of the memoir are skillfully interwoven with stories of the impressive achievements of the burn unit; specifically, he tells how the team worked wonders by always treating patients as beautiful people and by affirming every bit of progress that they made in their arduous journeys back to their everyday lives. Fratianne’s own health scare at the book’s climax only underscores the lessons that he so touchingly conveys throughout.
A straightforward and uplifting story of helping others through earnest Christian faith.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 978-1-59299-018-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Franklin Street Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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