A captivating and detailed look at the evolution of the medical profession as seen by one physician over 50 years.
A surgeon recounts his long career, revealing his struggles to become a pre-eminent doctor one operation at a time in this debut memoir.
Kaplan grew up in the New York area in the 1930s as a student with average grades, but he was greatly marked by two events: his first major surgery (for appendicitis) and the death of his Uncle Edward—most likely due to a misdiagnosis. After being admitted to Michigan State, the author embarked on the path to becoming a doctor. But when seeking admission to medical schools, he encountered discrimination due to his Jewish heritage, stiff competition despite his exemplary college transcripts, and difficulty impressing the elite doctors of America’s finest universities (one particularly embarrassing moment scars him from ever again using the expression “pretty good”). Kaplan would eventually be admitted to the University of Buffalo, where he would begin building toward his goal of becoming a thoracic surgeon and where the thrill of actually operating came into perspective only minutes after starting his first internship. “I began to massage a heart during an actual cardiac arrest,” he writes. From that point on, he would jump from one urgent call and one grinding residency to another, from the Air Force to Westchester County and back to Manhattan, all while trying to realize his dream. Kaplan addresses the politics and cost-cutting techniques that often got in his way, but the majority of the book is dedicated to the various thrilling surgeries he performed across New York. (Blood often gushes “out by the bucketful,” and he gives an unforgettable description of the “stench of dead bowel” that will likely haunt squeamish readers for years to come.) While the author narrates these scenes with the precision and skill one expects of a surgeon, more introspective aspects lack the same intensity—he often reflects wisely on becoming a patient himself, but his family life and inner emotions are mostly absent from the memoir. Despite this minor shortcoming, Kaplan’s laser focus on his career delivers an engaging examination of what becoming a doctor really entails.
A captivating and detailed look at the evolution of the medical profession as seen by one physician over 50 years.Pub Date: June 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6102-2
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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