A sometimes disjointed memoir revealing the demons plaguing both the physician and the medical community in which he served.
With a blend of memoir and exposé, Deaton (Two Hands Full of Sunshine, 2009, etc.) struggles to make peace with the patient who forever changed his life and career.
The majority of Deaton’s memoir—the first in a trilogy detailing his life as a physician—is devoted to his post–Great Depression childhood in a small Texas town. Born to an alcoholic, absent father and an emotionally distant mother, Deaton spent much of his childhood alone. Despite a dysfunctional home life, he found inspiration in the teachers and mentors who provided him with the necessary tools to succeed in life. To Deaton’s credit, his introspective nature allows him to recognize the value of these adult guardians, evidenced by the gratitude he expresses with unselfconscious sincerity. Juxtaposed with these memories—which are presented in no particular chronological order—is the story of Maria Chavarria, a 17-year-old patient Deaton met as an intern during his ob-gyn rotation at Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital. As a freshly minted M.D., Deaton began his internship anticipating he’d become the kind of physician he admired as a child, but he soon discovers medicine’s dark side. Deaton’s writing reveals the depth of his passion. The events leading up to Maria’s wholly preventable death are recounted with surgical precision, yet Deaton never loses sight of his patient’s humanity. The most dramatic passages describe the inner turmoil wrought upon the author by this tragedy of medicine. No one is treated with kid gloves in this book, including Deaton. Empathy and sensitivity are directed toward his patient, while the outrage is directed toward those the author holds responsible. Genuinely profound insights can be found throughout this memoir, and the author’s explanation of the power dynamics behind medical care is positively brilliant. If Deaton fails anywhere, it’s in tying the two disparate story lines together, but there’s no question he’s an excellent writer.
A sometimes disjointed memoir revealing the demons plaguing both the physician and the medical community in which he served.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5526-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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