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...
(You can also read the reviews from the critics,
as well as from other readers...)
Danielle Ofri is a
finely gifted writer, a born storyteller as well as a born
physician, and through these fifteen brilliantly written
episodes covering the years from studenthood to the end
of her medical residency, we get not only a deep sense of
the high drama of life and death which must face anyone
working in a great hospital, but a feeling for the making
of a physician's mind and soul, and for her bravery and
vulnerabilities as she goes through the long years of apprenticeship.
— Oliver Sacks, author
of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife
for a Hat
A searing, tough and tender story
of a young woman learning not only to be a humane doctor
but truly human-all the more remarkable for her teacher
being the grande dame of city hospitals, Bellevue, and her
patients being the whole New York City world. Written with
courage, humility, art, and heart.
— Samuel Shem,
author of The House of God and Mount Misery
This is a beautiful book about
souls and bodies, sadness and healing at a remarkable hospital.
Danielle Ofri has so much to say about the remarkable intimacies
between doctor and patient, about the bonds and the barriers,
and above all about how doctors come to understand their
powers and their limitations. This is a book written in
lyrical language about a hospital which cares for the poor
and the homeless, a book which celebrates the complexity
of life and death.
— Perri Klass, author
of Love and Moden Medicine and A Not Entirely
Benign Procedure
Danielle
Ofri stands observing at the crossroads of the remarkable
lives that intersect at Bellevue. She is dogged, perceptive,
unafraid and willing to probe her own motives as well as
those of others. This is what it takes for a good physician
to arrive at the truth, and these same qualities make her
an essayist of the first order.
— Abraham Verghese,
author of The Tennis Partner and My Own Country
With passion,
reverence, and rage, Ofri exposes the daily indignities
and triumphs of city hospital care. Seeking both confirmation
and absolution, she depicts the honor, the failures, the
savagery, and the deep, deep sorrow of medicine. Life is
saturated with death, she reminds us, as is death with life.
General readers will learn some medicine from this book,
while doctor-readers will weep to relive their own initiation
into the care of the sick.
—
Rita Charon, M.D., Ph.D., Director, Program in Narrative
Medicine, Columbia University; Editor-in-Chief Literature
and Medicine
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