Mallory may have been an important orthopedic surgeon, but he’s no Jerome Groopman.
Tedious memoir of a retired physician.
Mallory’s recollections plod along through adolescence in 1950s Ohio, medical residency at Ohio State, cutting-edge work in hip replacement and his deepening Christian faith. About the early days of his marriage, he has nothing more interesting to impart than the fact that they were poor: “My bride and I were wrapped in blankets because the 1946 Ford I drove had no heater.” (Don’t worry; they eventually bought a big house and fancy cars.) A few details do humanize Mallory. He is frank, for example, about his desire to make money, and he freely admits he often didn’t spend enough time with his wife. But his workmanlike prose offers a textbook example for writing students of what not to do. Countless redundancies (“I was financially solvent”) and overblown adjectives (“profound,” “agonizing”) weigh down the text. Mallory manages to transform potentially revelatory moments, such as his discovery that the kindly surgeon directing his residency had end-stage cancer, into trite musings about “life’s uncertainties.” Show-don’t-tell may be overused advice, but it certainly applies here: Introducing a key story with a trite phrase like, “a tragic event occurred that affected me greatly,” is guaranteed to suck the life out of even the most powerful vignette. Extraneous reflections on (for instance) the importance of having a yard for the kids don’t serve the larger narrative—then again, it never really becomes clear what the larger narrative is. Most readers won’t make it to what is presumably intended to be the book’s emotional climax, when knee-replacement surgery and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease show the great doctor what it’s like to be a patient.
Mallory may have been an important orthopedic surgeon, but he’s no Jerome Groopman.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1773-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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