Despite occasional long-windedness, Hatch’s analysis is intelligent, nuanced, and tempered, a necessary departure from the...
An American doctor describes his experiences in Liberia during the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic.
Hatch (Infectious Disease and Immunology/Univ. of Massachusetts Medical School; Snowball in a Blizzard: A Physician's Notes on Uncertainty in Medicine, 2016; etc.) first went to Liberia in November 2013, months before the Ebola outbreak began in earnest, to volunteer at the John F. Kennedy Hospital in Monrovia. By the time the first confirmed cases of Ebola were registered in West Africa, Hatch had returned to his life and work in the United States. But he felt such obligation that eventually, after overcoming various bureaucratic hurdles, he returned to Liberia, to volunteer in an Ebola Treatment Unit in Bong County. His deployment lasted six weeks. Hatch narrates those experiences in detail, from the day-to-day problems of shaving, dressing in personal protective equipment in extreme heat, and dehydration to the horrors experienced by his patients, which he witnessed daily. Hatch is a capable writer; his descriptions are fluid, and his voice is engaging. However, he has a tendency to extrapolate at length on issues that are likely to be of less interest to readers—those bureaucratic hurdles, for example. Nor is Hatch entirely successful in achieving the outsized ambitions he lists at the beginning of the book, which include not only analyzing the causes, extent, and impact of the Ebola outbreak, but also the intent to “rob the virus of its metaphorical power, which requires calling attention to the institution of sub–Saharan African slavery and the changes it wrought on at least three continents.” Still, Hatch’s testimony is a useful addition to the popular literature about the Ebola outbreak.
Despite occasional long-windedness, Hatch’s analysis is intelligent, nuanced, and tempered, a necessary departure from the panicked response of most American media outlets.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08513-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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