Levenstein’s devotion to the Italian practice of medicine is admirable, and she delivers a charming story well told.
In her first book, Levenstein recounts how a one-year assignment in Rome became 40 years of practicing medicine in Italy.
In 1978, the author and her husband moved to his home city of Rome and quickly faced the difficult task of navigating Italy’s infamous bureaucracy. One of the first words to learn, she writes, was “pazienza,” or “patience squared,” which is “often invoked as a gentle reprimand for a foreigner’s loss of cool” and “extends beyond the prosaic ‘keep waiting’ to the philosophical.” She also learned ways around the system; someone always knows someone who can grease the wheels. After finally gaining the official title of Dottoressa, waiting for the sole calligrapher to produce her diploma took nearly two decades. In the meantime, finding a position with an established group was not as hard as finding an office. Levenstein tried out numerous different offices, each with a seemingly worse landlord than the last, until her group settled in 2010. The most interesting part of the book is the author’s descriptions of her alternating admiration and horror at Italian medical practices. Collegiality is all but unknown, and there are no referrals. Office hours are optional. Doctors almost never touch their patients, but they always listen to every word. Though they write prescriptions, the pharmacist can and will substitute another drug. As for testing, if a patient feels she needs an MRI, CT scan, or other test, she can just go in to the office and request one. Levenstein also demonstrates how well universal health coverage works. Italians live some of the longest, healthiest lives of anyone on the planet, mostly due to diet, accessible care, and even distribution of wealth. The author gives many illuminating examples of patient encounters as well as encouraging accounts of alternative forms of treatment.
Levenstein’s devotion to the Italian practice of medicine is admirable, and she delivers a charming story well told.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-58988-139-6
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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