In this coming-of-age debut, plastic surgeon Youn chronicles his sometimes-harrowing journey to becoming a doctor.
The author’s father surmounted tremendous obstacles to emigrate from Korea to become an obstetrician with a thriving U.S. practice, and he had high academic expectations for his son. When he was seven years old, the author writes, his father told him, “Tony, you become a transplant surgeon.” When Youn replied that he wasn't sure he wanted to be a doctor, his father's anger was explosive and he never challenged him again. The author succeeded in gaining social acceptance among his peers in Greenville, Mich., the small, lily-white, conservative community where the family lived. He writes that he was considered to be one of the cool kids, although his success with girls was limited. But when he attended Kalamazoo College, he was excluded socially and uniformly rejected by every young woman he approached. Academically, he was on track for medical school, a transition he looked forward to with high hopes. The author writes amusingly about his expectations: “Chicks love doctors. I’m going to med school to get laid.” While that didn't prove to be the case, Youn offers amusing stories about his ineptitude with his dates; eventually, he made close friendships and ultimately met his future wife. In medical school, he had the first glimmering of a vocation for medicine, but his hospital training experiences—described in humorous detail—were hellacious. Only when he was called to assist in an operation on a child whose face had been mauled by a raccoon, and was captivated by the thrill of reconstructive surgery, did he find his true vocation as a plastic surgeon. While the author admits to taking “some comedic license,” the story of his Korean family and his struggle to find his path have greater appeal.
Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0844-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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