Well-written stories about keeping one’s head and humanity amid the rawness of emergency medicine.
Sixteen short stories explore the urgent tensions of life and death in a rural hospital’s emergency room.
Although the stories and characters in emergency-medicine physician Green’s debut collection are fictional, he bases them on real experience, giving readers an insider’s look at a rural trauma ward. Unsurprisingly, several stories deal with loss, tragedy, and the difficulty of letting go. Others touch on misdiagnoses of character: a seemingly neglectful meth-head mother turns out to be a good Samaritan (“Saviors”); in “Family,” an alcoholic and annoying ER regular redeems himself by running off a threatening pill-seeker and becomes the hospital’s trusted security guard (“sometimes all a person needs is a chance to prove himself”). Big-city ERs are commonly the setting for medical dramas, so the particular challenges of an understaffed and remote emergency department will be less familiar to readers, and the stories exploring these particular challenges are among the collection’s strongest. “This is the only ER in town. I am the only ER doctor awake in the county right now,” writes the narrator (also called Dr. Green) in “The Crew.” He’s awakened at 2 a.m. for an incoming trauma: four teenagers dead or dying from a car accident on prom night. In the big city, a team of 20 specialists might be on hand; here, the trauma team is one doctor (himself), two nurses, and a respiratory tech. The title comes from a private joke—they call themselves “the crew that do,” which is “a quiet comfort in the middle of the night.” They need this comfort even more on this night; doing the math, Dr. Green realizes that there is a “one-in-fourteen chance that one of our kids was in that car.” It’s the paradoxical, poignant condition of their work that, to function well, they have become a tightknit family who can shut down their emotions—even if it could mean coding one of their own family members. Some stories veer beyond poignancy into the sentimental, however, as in “Transitions,” about a high-school athlete whose death motivates her team to win the state championship.
Well-written stories about keeping one’s head and humanity amid the rawness of emergency medicine.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-51-190002-7
Page Count: 162
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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