A good read, with interesting and credible characters working their way through the chaos of modern hospital life.
A sort of curried Scrubs, in which physician/novelist Nigam (The Snake Charmer, 1998) takes us on Grand Rounds through a New York City hospital staffed largely by Indian expatriates.
During his residency, Sonny Seth finds himself faced with weird conditions and even weirder patients every day and is given very little time to think about them. Raised in Arizona, Sonny is of Indian birth, but he never knew his father and seems more at ease with American culture than do many of his (largely Indian) patients. There’s Sonali, for instance, whose husband Nishad became so obsessed with her buttocks that he succumbed to temptation one night and took a bite out of one of them (which became badly infected). There’s the Comatose Patient, who is actually perfectly lucid but pretends to be unconscious to avoid dealing with his wife and mistress (who hate him). And the Transplanted Man, in for kidney dialysis, has over the years exchanged his lungs, corneas, pancreas, heart, and liver for new models. Minister of Health in the Indian government, the Transplanted Man is thought to have a good shot at becoming the next prime minister, but there are financial scandals in his past—and his opponents are making hay of his tendency to travel abroad for medical treatment. One of his regular visitors is the Uriah Heep-ish Sharad Kakkar, a Bollywood matinee idol who wants to enter politics and is trying to wrest an endorsement from the Transplanted Man’s feeble fingers. Sonny grows close to the Transplanted Man, who turns out to have more of a connection with him than he would have guessed. Nigam’s cast of characters is large enough to provide plenty of distraction (a psychotherapist named Dr. Guru; a scientist who may have discovered a cure for insomnia; etc.) but not too numerous to overwhelm.
A good read, with interesting and credible characters working their way through the chaos of modern hospital life.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-688-16819-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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