In this coming-of-age debut, plastic surgeon Youn chronicles his sometimes-harrowing journey to becoming a doctor.
The author’s father surmounted tremendous obstacles to emigrate from Korea to become an obstetrician with a thriving U.S. practice, and he had high academic expectations for his son. When he was seven years old, the author writes, his father told him, “Tony, you become a transplant surgeon.” When Youn replied that he wasn't sure he wanted to be a doctor, his father's anger was explosive and he never challenged him again. The author succeeded in gaining social acceptance among his peers in Greenville, Mich., the small, lily-white, conservative community where the family lived. He writes that he was considered to be one of the cool kids, although his success with girls was limited. But when he attended Kalamazoo College, he was excluded socially and uniformly rejected by every young woman he approached. Academically, he was on track for medical school, a transition he looked forward to with high hopes. The author writes amusingly about his expectations: “Chicks love doctors. I’m going to med school to get laid.” While that didn't prove to be the case, Youn offers amusing stories about his ineptitude with his dates; eventually, he made close friendships and ultimately met his future wife. In medical school, he had the first glimmering of a vocation for medicine, but his hospital training experiences—described in humorous detail—were hellacious. Only when he was called to assist in an operation on a child whose face had been mauled by a raccoon, and was captivated by the thrill of reconstructive surgery, did he find his true vocation as a plastic surgeon. While the author admits to taking “some comedic license,” the story of his Korean family and his struggle to find his path have greater appeal.
Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0844-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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