A well-told story by a man of great accomplishment who is clearly proud—and rightly so.
Autobiography of a surgeon internationally recognized for his expertise in heart and lung transplants.
Jamieson (Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery/Univ. of California, San Diego), named a “Living Legend” by the World Society of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, writes with assurance and aplomb about his achievements. Even readers who have never heard of cyclosporine or been inside an operating room will relish this account, which is set in Africa, England, and the United States. In the first few chapters, the author gives us a taste of life in Rhodesia as it was for middle-class whites before the country became Zimbabwe. Jamieson provides wonderful stories of his brushes with wild animals in the bush and rather grim ones of the cold brutality of the boys school to which he was sent when he was 8. During his adolescence, “Rhodesia was coming apart”; when the author was 19, he left for London to begin his medical training. Perhaps the most astonishing part of this section, also full of stories of colleagues and patients, is the Rothschild episode. Jamieson won a major award from the ultrawealthy banking family, and after one of his projects caught the attention of Yvonne Rothschild, she invited him to her 200-room estate, and they became friends. The American section of the tale, which begins in 1978, features the author’s characteristic hard work, which led to great success and a meteoric career rise as well as clashing personalities, career infighting, job changes, and plenty of patients with life-threatening problems. While telling his own story, Jamieson also interweaves a history of heart transplants. He has little love for the South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who gained fame for performing the first heart transplant, but he offers plenty of warm regard for Denton Cooley, Norman Shumway, and the many others who created a new field of surgery.
A well-told story by a man of great accomplishment who is clearly proud—and rightly so.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948122-32-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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