A rewarding memoir.
Intrepid medical-school student confronts a deadly virus decimating West Africa.
During his second year of medical school, Donaldson became intrigued by the deadly Lassa fever, a rat-borne hemorraghic virus closely related to the Ebola and Marburg varieties that, left untreated, virtually liquefies the body’s internal organs. Convinced he could help ease the suffering, he spent the summer of 2003 in civil-war–torn Sierra Leone, where Lassa was reaching epidemic proportions. The trip, Donaldson admits, while initially an exhilarating “mix of danger and adventure,” soon became an all-encompassing endeavor that he came close to regretting several times. After a tour of the poverty-stricken environs, the author apprenticed under renowned Lassa expert Dr. Conteh, who was in charge of the Lassa ward in the town of Kenema. A desperate fight to save a female villager from cerebral malaria would pale in comparison to Donaldson’s months of frenzied work in the 20-bed facility, especially after Conteh departed for a week to oversee a program of health-care training, leaving the author in charge of the ward. Though overwhelmed and unprepared to make some of “the most critical decisions of [his] life,” Donaldson and his bare-bones medical staff trudged on, diagnosing, curing and sometimes burying contagious villagers as lines continued to form outside his door. Near the end of his time in West Africa, Donaldson faced an extremely tough personal challenge as well—a diagnosis of myocarditis, a crippling, life-threatening autoimmune disease. Passionate humanitarianism permeates the author’s memoir. In a heartfelt epilogue, he compassionately acknowledges that the work he performed in West Africa is integral to the way he practices medicine today.
A rewarding memoir.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37700-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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