A fervent, anecdotal memoir infused with heart, compassion, and a natural love for animals on every page.
Affecting dispatches from the life of an animal doctor.
Fincham-Gray, who has had a successful career in both Europe and the United States, recalls growing up just walking distance from an animal clinic on the Welsh border where she volunteered and groomed her career aspirations. Despite a childhood spent without a family pet, her love of animals flourished thanks in part to her father, a veterinary lab microbiologist who generously shared an appreciation for science with her. Overcoming an allergy to horses, insecurities at university, and demanding anatomy classes, she excelled at veterinary school and realized her dream. In this affably written amalgam of pedagogic and heartwarming material, the author chronicles her early years as a medical professional, particularly the culture shock of learning American vet medicine throughout her internship and the unique animals she encountered along the way. Readers meet emergency room patients like Missy, the tortoiseshell cat who was impaled by an arrow, and Tiger, who was saddled with a severe bladder blockage but managed to recover and thrive. Fincham-Gray also writes about how she endured the crushing heartbreak of euthanizing a dog with terminal pancreatitis and bidding farewell to her own aging cat. Once separated from the “protective custody of academia,” the author worked in private practices on both the East and West coasts. She discusses how she cured a septic Irish wolfhound named Grayling, a Mexican-born canine who’d contracted “the oldest continuously surviving cancer in nature,” and Sweetie, a young pit bull terrier whose diagnosis and patient care are the most complicated in the book, medically, financially, and emotionally. Fincham-Gray also imparts cautionary information on the medical consequences of obese pets. Pet fanatics and animal lovers in general will savor these bittersweet stories exploring the enduring human-animal bond.
A fervent, anecdotal memoir infused with heart, compassion, and a natural love for animals on every page.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9818-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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