Memoir of the much-admired pediatrician and prolific author.
Brazelton (Emeritus, Pediatrics/Harvard Medical School) opens with frank comments about his own unhappy childhood, his distant relationship with his parents and his early talent for taking care of small children. He skims through his medical education and naval service and hits his stride when he turns to the years when he began to combine the practice of pediatrics and psychiatry. A more accurate title for this book would be Learning to Observe, for Brazelton became a keen observer of newborns and from these observations developed with his colleagues the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale, a comprehensive scale for understanding the temperament of newborns that is still taught and used today. He also explains Touchpoints, a theory of the forces that drive child development that is taught to professionals at the Brazelton Touchpoints Center at Boston Children’s Hospital and to parents in a series of popular books. For general readers—i.e., those who are not new parents—the most fascinating parts of the memoir are most likely to be his accounts of his experiences studying newborns in other cultures: Mayans in southern Mexico, Guatemalans, Kenyans, urban and rural Japanese, Chinese, Navajos in Arizona and Greeks on the island of Thera. The author is not shy about his accomplishments, and he appears to take special delight in telling of encounters with vocal admirers, of his put-downs of those less respectful, and of his brushes with the famous. Readers familiar with Brazelton’s books and articles on babies and children may relish this close-up look at the man who guided them through the vicissitudes of parenthood; others, not so much.
Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7382-1667-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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