Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm remains this year’s medical memoir to beat, but Francis acquits himself well.
Doctors with literary ambitions write memoirs, tell stories about patients, or educate us. Scottish physician Francis (Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins, 2013, etc.) successfully combines all three.
In 18 chapters on 18 body parts, the author delivers no-nonsense lessons on anatomy and biology, each illustrated with a patient plus regular detours into medical history, medical scandal, and his own colorful life. “This book is a series of stories about the body in sickness and in health, in living and dying,” he writes at the beginning. A man appears with a nail through his palm or a wine bottle in his rectum. A depressive, immobile and silent for years, slowly begins to move and speak, more each day after a series of electroshocks to his brain. A couple undergoes the detailed unpleasantness of an infertility exam and then the even more detailed and unpleasant (and expensive) procedure for in vitro fertilization. Other chapters provide odd, penetrating insights—e.g., poets undergo open-heart surgery or breast cancer mastectomy and reveal the experience in verse. Even experienced doctors will perk up at some of the author’s digressions. One example: the Romans could not have crucified Jesus as traditionally described. Tissues in the palm are too fragile to support a man’s weight (the experiment has been done). Nails through the wrist would have worked. Many anecdotes are the bizarre sort that medical students employ to impress other people, and Francis portrays himself as a healer of almost supernatural compassion, but he has enjoyed a spectacularly varied career as a general practitioner, emergency room doctor, and volunteer in third world clinics and polar exploration. The result is plenty of good material, and he possesses the writing talent to bring it to life.
Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm remains this year’s medical memoir to beat, but Francis acquits himself well.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-07968-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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