A veteran physician performs radical surgery on American health care in this uneven satire.
The madness of life in a busy urban hospital.
With the issue of health care atop the American political agenda, the time couldn’t be better for a darkly comic look at some of the worst excesses of the current system. Shem (The House of God, 1978, etc.) gathers the cast of that earlier novel in a hospital owned by a rapacious conglomerate known as BUDDIES. There, at the Future of Medicine Clinic: Care, Compassion, and Cancer conceived by their former mentor, Fat Man, their goal is to “put the human back in health care.” In the spirit of Catch-22 and M.A.S.H., narrator Roy Basch and fellow physicians with nicknames like Eat My Dust Eddie and Hyper Hooper struggle to subvert the operation of a system that tethers doctors to keyboards and monitors, where they find themselves “treating the screens, not the patients,” jeopardizing both their patients’ well-being and their own in the process. Daily life is a war between the hospital and insurance companies, each side single-mindedly dedicated to maximizing its profit, with the doctors collateral damage in that ceaseless conflict. But when HEAL, the $2.6 billion electronic health records system at Man’s 4th Best Hospital, crashes and stops transmitting OUTGOING data, forcing the doctors to connect with the vulnerable human beings in their care, there’s a hint of what a patient-centered world might look like. The novel is infused with manic activity, but with the exception of Fat Man, Roy, and Roy’s wife, Berry, a psychologist whose Buddhist beliefs can’t wean her from an unhealthy attachment to what Roy calls her “ ‘I’-phone,” the characters tend to get lost in the swirl of the crisis-driven plot. Shem’s comic touch is broad, his villains the usual suspects, and his prescription for curing what he sees as the disease of a system driven by the unceasing imperative to earn more money facile, but perhaps his vision of a medical world that applies a human touch to technology will inspire those seeking to achieve it.
A veteran physician performs radical surgery on American health care in this uneven satire.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0536-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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