While recounting turbulent events in a physician’s life, this book lacks vivid details.
Bentley’s second memoir (A License to Heal: Random Memories of an ER Doctor, 2014) tells his rags-to-riches story of overcoming poverty and abuse to become a doctor.
The author’s early life was brutal. Along with his older sisters and younger brother, he was raised by a mother who had problems with alcohol and turned to prostitution to make money. The kids got split up for a time when they were put in a home run by an uncaring headmistress. Things weren’t much better when they moved in with their father and were mistreated by their new stepmother, who favored her own children. According to Bentley, she sexually abused him on more than one occasion. He found the beginnings of his way out when he started helping his father at his pharmacy and took an interest in medicine (“I enjoyed the work and loved to learn. Soon, I was doing the work of a pharmacist, but for a lot less money”). The first two-thirds of the book talks about Bentley’s childhood, and the rest takes him from his college years to working as an emergency room doctor, with frequent diversions to talk about some enjoyable trips he took around the world. It’s an inspiring story, but Bentley doesn’t offer a lot of specifics. He doesn’t set scenes or even stick with one story for terribly long. He mentions a young woman named Gail he dated in college, relating how interesting she was and how they loved to talk. But he never shows readers a conversation between them or even reveals how they met. He also discusses how much of what his professors lectured about in college wasn’t applicable to the actual job of being a doctor. He writes that they insisted on teaching him the Krebs cycle but doesn’t explain what the cycle is, why it wasn’t applicable, or the kinds of things that a doctor needs to know in contrast. Bentley clearly has a lot to say, but what he puts in this account reads more like an outline than a fully realized memoir. The book could also use a good basic edit to excise the abundance of exclamation points and dashes.
While recounting turbulent events in a physician’s life, this book lacks vivid details.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1161-0
Page Count: 196
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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