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
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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