Klass (Other Women's Children, 1990, etc.) describes her pediatric internship and residency, stitching together previously published pieces from The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere with rambling journal entries and present-day commentaries on that sleep-deprived, transformative time. In this sort-of-sequel to A Not Entirely Benign Procedure (1987), which described her years at Harvard Med School, Klass details the dramatic moments of her internship—that legendary medical-boot-camp experience—in a shocked, ``I-can't-believe-I'm- the-doctor'' mode: ``So I bumble around the intensive care unit, set up to make it possible for a large group of highly trained adults to take care of a group of very sick, very small babies.'' Indeed, Klass's descriptions of the ethical dilemmas that, in the form of babies too sick too live, confront doctors in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) are gripping. But the one big idea she raises—the conflict between a physician's training and the moral judgment that it is sometimes better to let an unfinished being die—is repeated so often that it loses its power. Likewise, her journal entries are (by her own admission) repetitively self- involved. Klass's best moments come when she spills some of the secrets of a large pediatric hospital: ``Common diseases have common nicknames, of course; wheezer for asthmatic (rhymes with seizer—for kid with epilepsy, giving rise to many bad songs for the Christmas show), cystic for patient with cystic fibrosis, sickler for patient with sickle cell disease.'' We long for more such detail, however calculated, and less padded-sounding reflection about how afraid the young doctor was. The exception here is Klass's justified fear of the crazy person who accused her of plagiarism and made her junior year of residency a living hell. Klass employs an admirably smooth, breezy honesty, yet much of her material feels too pat and too calculated for publication to be really moving or illuminating.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40957-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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