An intimate, insightful meditation on the science, art, and business of healing.
A doctor reflects on medicine and the human drama underlying it in this heartfelt memoir.
Friedman recaps his 44-year career as a neurosurgeon, including a long tenure as the chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the University of Florida, in loose, episodic chapters full of reminiscences, medical lore, case studies, policy briefs, and philosophical musings. Among the grab bag are his recollections of confusion, anxiety, and sleep deprivation as a resident; detailed descriptions of surgical procedures; a poignant elegy on his mother’s decline and death from a brain tumor; explanations of his groundbreaking research into using electrical monitoring of neural activity to guide neurosurgeons; a sharp critique of American health care, which he calls a “disgrace” for its high cost, poor quality, and lack of universal coverage; a look at his own efforts to improve quality in his neurosurgery department with checklists and meticulous teamwork; a lengthy account of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, complete with the autopsy report; and a plangent chapter authored by his colleague Jobyna Whiting recounting an incident in which she treated a doomed victim of an auto accident and the shame-ridden man who killed her. Friedman’s narrative is a bit of a ramble, but his workmanlike prose and lucid discussions of complex medical issues make the many digressions a pleasure to follow. Personal relationships are central to his portrait of doctoring: He’s warmly appreciative of supportive teachers and mentors—and critical of the “impatience” and “cruelty” of others—and conveys both the camaraderie of medical practice and the occasional eruptions of poisonous office politics, including bogus allegations of financial misconduct leveled at him by an underperforming surgeon he tried to fire. He’s at his best in describing the emotional turmoil that besets every doctor amid the vagaries of life and death. (“A woman with everything to live for had come to me for help and, instead, had died….And thus began the process that occurs every time I have a bad result: relentless self-doubt and self-loathing. You veer into imposter syndrome where, for a time, you believe that you’re not really a good neurosurgeon, that you are entirely unworthy.”) The result is a frank, revealing view of a doctor’s experience.
An intimate, insightful meditation on the science, art, and business of healing.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63576-754-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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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