by John G. Deaton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2011
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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