Amusing medical stories as seen through the eyes of a new doctor.
Firsthand accounts of life as a newly graduated pediatric doctor.
When Rivkees (Pediatrics/Yale School of Medicine) entered his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, an institution affectionately nicknamed "Man's Greatest Hospital," he had recently graduated from a medical school in New Jersey. Like his fellow residents, some from austere schools like Harvard and Yale, he was not fully prepared for the demanding schedules, exhaustion and on-the-spot decisions required from a doctor on call. “[W]e soon saw that we were all the same—the same products of the same books, the same notes, and the same bland lectures,” writes the author. “We were to be later distinguished by our drive, creativity, and judgment.” Over time, and with the help of older doctors who had the patience and knowledge to diagnosis some bizarre cases, Rivkees learned the ins and outs of pediatric care. In short, almost abrupt prose, the author recalls riveting memories of those early years of practice when he had to learn how to start IVs in veins the size of pencil leads, how to diagnose rare diseases and how to deal with the agony of losing a patient. Threaded throughout the quick bedside stories of numerous patients are accounts of the humorous practical jokes Rivkees and his fellow residents played on one another to combat fatigue and boredom, including the theft of a 2,000-year-old mummy. Although many patients are introduced via emergency room or in-patient scenarios, most are abandoned in lieu of another tale, leaving readers to ponder what happened to that particular person after his or her hospital visit was over. Quick forays into the dates the author had with a variety of "Cathys" round out the reflections of a man who became a world leader in pediatrics and pediatric endocrinology.
Amusing medical stories as seen through the eyes of a new doctor.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9453-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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