Library Journal, 3/15/03

As Ofri relates in this marvelous book, becoming a doctor is a complex process. The author, who trained at New York City's famed inner-city, 250-year-old Bellevue Hospital and cofounded the Bellevue Literary Review, relates cases that revolve around gravely ill patients who die in stark and painful circumstances. Her gifted storytelling discloses a variety of patients, their medical needs, and the doctor-hospital-patient interface. How does "the System" make a doctor? The answer is still a big mystery (as David Duncan's Residents also makes clear). New, book-smart graduates must sometimes feel like impostors as they take up their residencies, but a few years later they discover that they have become doctors. It is this alchemy that Ofri's well-crafted prose successfully exposes. Her sometimes stressful and sad stories reveal that the connections made by a resident-physician with patients is a demanding part of medical training, a part that finally makes becoming a physician uplifting. Highly recommended for most medical collections and where patrons also enjoy works by Abraham Verghese and Atul Gawande.

[A chapter was selected for The Best American Essays of 2002 and won the Missouri Review Editor's Prize for Nonfiction.-Ed.]

James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.