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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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