An intelligent, sensitive reflection on the practice of medicine.
Kelly’s memoir explores the idea that medicine not only mends the body, but can also heal the soul.
This charming, touching collection of stories about medical work from a seasoned physician gives insights into the doctor-patient relationship. Kelly was driven to become a doctor by the feeling of security he experienced when attending a medical office as a child. Here, he considers the many lessons learned from his patients. From the shock of encountering his first cadaver in medical school—the instructor reminded the class that the body must be treated like that of a loved one—to the ache of losing a patient, Kelly recounts intimate conversations and situations that mark him as an attentive, compassionate professional. He writes of medical school and his first medical residency and recounts the learning curves, trials, and errors that characterized those years (“Chris was the first person I’d watched die right in front of me….And I felt like a failure for not being able to save him”). Though concerned with the tribulations and idiosyncrasies of the medical occupation specifically, the memoir shows how any profession in which one encounters the misfortunes and tragedies of strangers can drive one to be more empathetic. The book, then, is just as much an exploration of the meaning of life and morality in the face of mortality—a fact we are made all the more conscious of by illness and injury—as it is an exploration of the emotional trajectory of one man’s experience of becoming a doctor. Deeply humane and eminently readable, this book provides a model for mutual understanding between doctors and those they treat. More than this, though, it emphasizes the importance of listening: to the voices, as well as the bodies, of others.
An intelligent, sensitive reflection on the practice of medicine.Pub Date: March 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0991274321
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Art Heals Media
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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