A compelling story of medical tragedy.
Harbin (The Business Side of Medicine, 2012, etc.) investigates medical misadventure and malpractice at the top of the ophthalmology profession.
In 1983, H. Dwight Cavanagh, a professor of ophthalmology and department chairman at Emory University’s School of Medicine in Atlanta, prepared to do a corneal transplant on his patient. As usual, he was pressed for time, as he normally scheduled up to 13 procedures per day. His colleagues had previously expressed concern about his habit of biting off more than he could chew, and on this day, Harbin writes, the doctor’s overzealousness caught up with him, resulting in a botched operation that blinded his patient. The doctor eventually lost his job and titles—a small price to pay for such mayhem. Harbin tells an engaging story of a doctor that came to believe in his own infallibility and whose greed and thirst for power caused his patients irreparable harm. One sad element of the story, as presented by the author, is that the doctor’s malpractice didn’t go unnoticed by his peers; unfortunately, his status had long prevented accusations and complaints from being dealt with appropriately. If not for two conscientious doctors, the crimes might have been swept under the rug. The story covers events that occurred over the course of many years, necessitating gaps in chronology, but readers will never have a sense that they’re missing anything. The fact that Harbin is a physician adds immeasurably to his account’s integrity and believability, and his use of layman’s terms will make it easy for mainstream readers to understand. As a result, this narrative of medical misadventure is likely to interest anyone who’s ever put their faith and trust in a doctor.
A compelling story of medical tragedy.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1934938874
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Langdon Street Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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