After this auspicious start, one hopes that the good doctor will keep on writing. Highly recommended. A keeper.
This memoir by a country doctor Down Under is rife with memorable characters and odd happenings. And the reader gets a glimpse of semi-exotic Australia.
Debut memoirist Carter and his wife moved from their native England to Australia in the 1970s, settling in Melbourne. They tried to start a new, antipodean life after the death of their infant daughter, but the loss eventually killed the marriage. At a loss himself, Carter relocated farther into the countryside and found himself a harried country doctor (underscore “found himself”). Woongarra seems at times like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo: Not only do Carter and his dog, Hardy, have soulful conversations, but Carter has mixed “true life events with small doses of storytelling, and the final brew is a mix of many things that really took place and a few that definitely never did.” We meet Dave, filthy and homeless but an amazing musician; Phill (the second l is silent, he says), the gay waiter with the Carmen Miranda headgear; the prolific Gaggliano clan with their inedible sausages; Teddy and Michael, a gay couple with a gentle hospitality; and several others. Most chapters are humorous, but some are bittersweet and then some. We get the back story—thanks to Teddy’s prompting—of the death (SIDS?) of Carter’s daughter at 10 months. We get the brave story of twisted Isobel and the heartbreaking one of Eileen and Harold, for whom reconciliation comes too late. With Carter, we mourn Hardy’s death. And at book’s end, our hero has found a good woman to be his second wife (“Helen” in the book, Gillian in real life). Carter often gets his leg pulled or gets a bum rap for something not of his own making, but he is an innately cheerful, decent chap, and that shines through. The reader comes to like Doc Carter a lot; he is the antidote to Doc Martin of PBS fame. Carter is an impressively gifted tyro who understands fictional tricks better than many experienced practitioners of the craft.
After this auspicious start, one hopes that the good doctor will keep on writing. Highly recommended. A keeper.Pub Date: April 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499000122
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
