Harman comes across as a genuinely caring health professional, writes engagingly of her world and gives a frank picture of...
Captivating memoir of the trials and tribulations of a doctor-nurse team struggling to keep a small West Virginia women’s health center afloat and their 30-year marriage intact.
Harman, a nurse-midwife, and her husband, a gynecological surgeon, stopped delivering babies when payments for medical insurance became unaffordable, but they continued to offer first-trimester care and gynecological examinations. The women who donned a blue cotton gown in Harman’s examining room received far more than a pelvic exam; she listened to their personal problems and freely dispensed friendly, often motherly advice and lots of warm hugs. Among those patients were Kasmar, a middle-aged woman intent on becoming a man; Heather, an unwed teenager pregnant with twins who died in the womb; Shiana, a college student with a used condom stuck inside her; Nilla, a mother of seven with a sexually abused four-year-old daughter; and Trish, whose daughter had a baby with her drug-addicted boyfriend and then may or may not have killed herself. In the midst of these female troubles, the author underplays her own surgery for uterine cancer. Meanwhile, back at the office, accountants mishandled the practice’s financial affairs, debts mounted and letters from lawyers threatened malpractice suits. Her reliance on a middle-of-the-night shot of scotch as a sleep aid, hardly the approved medical remedy for insomnia, indicates the level of stress endured. Although she writes of her husband with a mix of respect, admiration, exasperation and love, he remains a rather vague figure in this world of women. Brief chapters tell of their early life together as hippies in a commune and her first experience helping with a home birth, which led her to become a certified nurse-midwife, but her focus is on the problem-filled present.
Harman comes across as a genuinely caring health professional, writes engagingly of her world and gives a frank picture of the pressures and strains of a husband-wife team running a small medical practice.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7289-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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