In this unsparingly honest chronicle, Tweedy cohesively illuminates the experiences of black doctors and black patients and...
An arresting memoir that personalizes the enduring racial divide in contemporary American medicine.
When North Carolina physician and psychiatry professor Tweedy first entered Duke University Medical School as one of only six black students on a full-tuition scholarship, he was already well-aware of the vast health disparities between black and white populations, where lack of insurance and “poverty topped the list of culprits.” Throughout grueling years of intensive schooling and patient care, the doctor repeatedly pondered his role as a black physician in a predominantly white medical community. Tweedy devotes equal time to his academic term in medical school, to a yearlong clinical apprenticeship where he swiftly became “consumed by the broader health problems of my race,” and to his former psychiatry practice. Early on in his career at Duke, his resolve was tested when a professor mistook him for a janitor, yet he remained committed. Tweedy’s tenure throughout his hospital internship forms the memoir’s riveting centerpiece. Structured around fast-paced, eye-opening medical cases encountered on clinical rotations, many episodes are tainted with the stigma of social, racial, and economically charged misconceptions and biases. The author includes anecdotes featuring prejudiced patients and discriminatory doctors as well as one about a longtime-married Christian man’s shocking HIV seroconversion. Tweedy also shares his own battles with inherited kidney disorders and hypertension along with lucid thoughts on a physician’s obligation to community health and the liberating power of tolerance. Clearly at odds with the racial and class-stratified machinations of the medical industry, the author writes with dignified authority on the imbalances in opportunities and available social and medical service platforms to the many African-American patients seeking clinical care and of his pivotal role in making a difference.
In this unsparingly honest chronicle, Tweedy cohesively illuminates the experiences of black doctors and black patients and reiterates the need for improved understanding of racial differences within global medical communities.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04463-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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