A window into an unfamiliar world where excellence is difficult to achieve yet absolutely essential.
Close-up and personal view of a surgical team at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Diseases.
Ruhlman, who previously explored excellence in craft at the Culinary Institute of America (The Making of a Chef, 1997) and at a Martha’s Vineyard boatyard (Wooden Boats, 2001), shifts his attention to a field where highly developed skill can make the difference between life and death. The author focuses on Dr. Roger Mee, regarded as a man who can “walk on water,” one of the best in his field, and his associates on the surgical team at the Cleveland Clinic, where they daily repair the malformed hearts of babies. Ruhlman was allowed into the operating room to observe intricate procedures being performed on newborn infants undergoing open-heart surgery. To understand what he was seeing, he conducted extensive interviews with doctors, nurses, and physicians’ assistants. To round out his story, he questioned team members to get their personal stories (and their assessments of one another); he also interviewed the anxious parents of the infants whose problems had brought them to the clinic. Dramatic moments abound as unexpected complications cascade into narrowly averted disasters and last-minute heart transplants, and at these moments the expertise that Rulhman admires becomes most apparent. Yet frequently the narrative gets bogged down and the action blurred by overuse of medical terminology (e.g., “residual ventricular septal defect”) and by technical details of more interest to a surgeon-in-training than a layperson. In addition to revealing the prowess of the surgical team at Cleveland, Ruhlman provides a brief history of pediatric heart surgery and presents a disturbing view of the politics of cardiology referrals. Finally, a resource section offers advice for parents faced with making decisions about the care of a child with a congenital heart defect.
A window into an unfamiliar world where excellence is difficult to achieve yet absolutely essential.Pub Date: April 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03201-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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