An engaging account of a three-year odyssey of medicine and personal growth in the East.
In this memoir, a newly certified New York City ear, nose, and throat specialist goes to Thailand to help the underprivileged and learn about the world and himself.
As one of five sons of a divorced mother, Moss grew up in the mean streets of the Bronx with little reason to expect that he’d someday get a degree in medicine. However, after overcoming several roadblocks and changes of mind, he committed himself to long years of medical study. Even after achieving his goal of becoming an otolaryngological surgeon, he was faced with an agonizing choice—set up a practice and start making good money or travel to a less-developed country and assist those in desperate need. Urged on by his interest in Eastern religion and a timely fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant (“Do not forsake your dreams for material security”), he took a job at a clinic in northern Thailand. Young and inexperienced, he dealt with horrific cancers and infections and an overwhelming lack of resources. However, he was deeply impressed with his colleagues’ resourcefulness and his patients’ calm acceptance of their conditions. He also fell in love with the leisurely pace of Thailand, where people walked more slowly than they did in New York. As he continued his practice in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh, Richard learned from his patients, other native people, and expatriates, and he even unexpectedly got married along the way. Overall, Moss (Matilda’s Triumph, 2013, etc.) has constructed a moving and persuasive memoir that will draw the reader in from the very first chapter. By interspersing italicized flashbacks of his early life among his evolving experiences in foreign lands, he adds texture and depth to both storylines. His portraits of the people he meets, his chronicle of his spiritual development, and his anecdotes about occasional culture clashes are all vivid and compelling. Some of the clinical and surgical scenes are grisly, but many also have the urgency and drama of an episode of ER—if not the pat, happy ending that such fiction often provides.
An engaging account of a three-year odyssey of medicine and personal growth in the East.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-5951-7
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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