A pleasure to read, thanks to the author’s ability to see her patients as individuals and to form a genuine connection with...
A second collection of perceptive essays about Ofri’s continuing growth as physician, fulfilling the promise of Singular Intimacies (2003).
Now an attending physician at Bellevue, the author found that her journey to becoming a healer was filled with lessons learned from patients. After completing her residency in internal medicine at Bellevue, Ofri traveled in Mexico, studied Spanish, and worked in small-town hospitals. Her patients included an old man on Florida’s Gulf Coast with no will to live, a young woman in New England needing a hard-to-get abortion, and an impassive Navajo woman in New Mexico whose untreated acne troubled her more than the violence in her life; their cases reminded the author of the limits of her medical skills. On her return to Bellevue, her time was divided between the medical clinic, where she often followed patients for months or even years, and four-week-long stints on the medical wards, where her time with patients was intense but often cut off before their full stories could be known. Among the characters she chooses to profile here are a crotchety old man whose disposition improved when she bought him painting supplies and reading glasses, a disconnected adolescent whose outlook on life changed when she coached him for his SAT, a disturbed woman who faked symptoms to get medical care, and a depressed patient who refused needed treatment. In writing their stories, she is writing her own, Ofri asserts: “In a jungle, they say, you often can’t tell which root system connects to which leaves.” One of the most valuable lessons a doctor can learn, the author believes, is what it feels like to be a patient. Her prologue reveals just how disconcerting that experience is when she finds herself shaken and sore after amniocentesis and a sonogram; a later chapter describes the humiliation and helplessness she felt both during and after giving birth.
A pleasure to read, thanks to the author’s ability to see her patients as individuals and to form a genuine connection with them.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-7266-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
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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