A soft-focus picture of how a determined young black woman made her way into the virtually all white, male world of transplant surgery. As a young child in Haiti, Toussaint was told by an old voodoo priest that she would become a physician and surgeon, a prediction that this former assistant director of the Howard University Hospital Transplant Center never forgot. Before revealing just how she made the prediction come true, she sketchily illustrates what the work of a liver transplant specialist involves by telling the stories of a couple of her patients. In the narration of her life that follows, an account that, despite the assistance of writer and editor Santaniello, is curiously short on specific details, such as names, dates, places, and schools she attended, there are a number of well-remembered scenes, but overall, the story has a vexing blurriness. She does, however, recall certain turning points clearly: her encounter with a high-school guidance counselor who tried vainly to direct her to technical school rather than a four-year college with pre-med courses, her post-college interview for a lowly job as lab-technician college, and a year later her medical school interview. Especially vivid is her recollection of an operating room incident in which she, a humble resident, takes quick action to avert a disaster and wins the chief surgeon's notice and approval. Glimpses of her love life and of her Haitain family add dimension to what remains, however, a shadowy self-portrait. Despite its shortcomings, Toussaint's story delivers a message not about miracles, but about hard work, dedication and persistence, good mentors, and, yes, some lucky breaks—a message not just for young black women, but for all young women fighting to win a place in a male profession. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-40723-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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