Nonfiction Book Reviews

I have mixed feelings about Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation by Sandeep Jauhar. It was a very hard book for me to get into, and in fact, I put it down for a month and didn’t touch it at all. I just couldn’t force myself to read it.

It’s the story of Sandeep Jauhar, whose older brother was a doctor, and whose parents wanted him to be a doctor too. Sandeep didn’t want to be a doctor because he was ill-suited for the profession (he was a thinker, not a doer - his words - and he also didn’t like blood). He also didn’t want to be a doctor because his parents wanted him to be a doctor.  Mature, I know.  It only gets worse.

So he got a PhD in Physics instead, which at the end of his schooling, he promptly decided that he didn’t want to be a physicist. So then he did nothing.

A few months later, he decided that he wanted to be a doctor (he’s not even sure why - he just decided to do it) and when he told his parents, they were understandably upset with him because this meant years of more schooling, and he was rather late getting to the game, not to mention all the money he had spent on his last doctorate degree.

Instead of letting that deter him, he said that his parents not wanting him to do it solidified his decision because apparently the only thing he wanted to do was what his parents didn’t want him to do.

Do you see why this book absolutely drove me crazy? He was indecisive, immature, and making huge mistakes for the heck of it, as far as I could tell.

So against his parents wishes, he enrolled in school yet again, this time to become a doctor. He gets through three years of school, and then becomes an intern at the New York City Hospital, where he promptly hates his life. He hates being a doctor, he isn’t good at it, he doesn’t really like the medicine world, and he doesn’t ever want to learn anything more than what he absolutely has to. A doctor was trying to explain the difference between two different kinds of medicine, and Sandeep basically said he didn’t give a darn.

All of this made me pretty frustrated with the book.  I went to Amazon at one point to look at the ratings for it, and was shocked to see it getting 4 and 5 star ratings.  Was someone reading a different book than I was? So far, there had been little to recommend it.

I decided to give it another 50 pages, which would have brought me to just over halfway through the book. If it didn’t turn around by then, I was giving it up for good. Perhaps it was going to be another Hope’s Boy, where I just never saw why other people liked it.

I hit the end of the 50 pages, and just kept going. It finally, finally started getting good. He started doing better at his job - caring about the patients more, having a better attitude about getting things done, and wanting to learn more about medicine instead of skating by with whatever he could get away with.

His second year, when he became a junior resident, went much better for him, and the book took a definite turn for the better. It was thoroughly interesting to me to see how difficult the field of medicine really is. The quality of life debate was a huge theme in this book - the doctors were able to keep someone alive, but at what cost? Should someone really be kept on life support when there was no chance of them getting better?

And what about patients who purposefully chose the choice that in the end would kill them? He had a patient who loved to eat, but when he swallowed, the food would sometimes end up in his lungs. Eating was literally killing him. But the patient loved to eat so much that not being allowed to eat was killing him too. Should the doctors allow him to eat, even when that choice meant eventual death?

Anyone who has spent a lot of time in a hospital being treated for a serious disease like cancer or leukemia would relate to Sandeep’s discussions of whether the cure really was better than just letting the disease run its course. Sometimes, the doctors would stop administering to a patient because they had given up all hope of curing him, and as soon as that happened, the patient would miraculously start to get better.  Sometimes the best medicine was to simply get out of the way of the body’s natural ability to heal itself, which Sandeep discusses quite often.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is chronically ill, or who has a loved one who is chronically ill. I think they would relate to much of what Sandeep talks about.  I would also recommend it to anyone looking at going into medicine as a career. But if you don’t have a whole lot of interest in hospitals, medicine, or doctors, skip this one. There would be better memoirs out there to read.

Overall, I’d have to give 4 out of 5 stars. I liked the writing style and I enjoyed the patient stories, but the book just took too long to get good.

Hava

China Ghosts: My Daughter’s Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood by Jeff Gammage was an excellent autobiography. I’ve read a string of less-than-stellar autobiographies lately (ie Hope’s Boy, Shattered Dreams, Enter the Past Tense) and I was ready for a great one. I found that in China Ghosts.

Jeff Gammage is a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and I think that had a LOT to do with how much I enjoyed the book - a newspaper reporter has to learn early on to weave a deft and interesting tale without using too much over-the-top descriptions, and that writing experience shows in his writing of this book. I’m starting to realize that I can put up with almost anything but a poor writing style: Typos, missing information that I think is important, and even swearing doesn’t bother me like bad writing does. Luckily, China Ghosts is very well written.

He spares no quarter for himself; he talks about how he never had any desire to have children, because he was self-centered and if there was another person in the equation, then that would mean his family and wife would pay attention to someone else other than himself - the horrors! He didn’t want that, and thus, he would’ve been happy if he and his wife stayed childless. Or so he thought.

But his wife was born with a nurturing instinct, and she wanted children, so Jeff said yes to make his wife happy. They tried for several years to have children, but eventually it was declared that they were infertile. My heart broke for them at this point - that’s actually something that my husband and I are struggling with. We have been trying for 4 years to get pregnant, and thus far, nothing has happened. It’s a very tough row to hoe. (If that’s something you also struggle with, make sure to check out the Infertility blog here at Today - it’s a great blog for infertility information).

Anyway, back to Jeff Gammage: He and his wife finally decide to go the adoption route, and for reasons he explains in detail in the book, they decide to adopt from China. He jumps back and forth in time, keeping your interest high, wondering what will happen next. This is not just a book about adopting a toddler, but of becoming a father, an especially difficult task for him since he had no previous experience with children. His transformation is astounding, and you realize that a parent’s love is truly boundless. When they finally pick their new daughter up, he falls head over heels in love with her, which was so sweet to see. It was beautifully written and by the end, I too had fallen in love with his daughter. She’s a cute little girl, and I loved watching her “grow up” (the book ends when she’s 6 years old).

He spends time explaining the background on different cities in China, and since that wasn’t as interesting to me, I simply skimmed those parts. I think that could have easily been left out of the book, but it wasn’t a huge deal. Even with that in there, it was a quick read (I finished it one day - I had a hard time putting it down!) and I’m hoping to someday read a “sequel” by his two daughters (he eventually adopts a second daughter from China). That would just be so fun for me.

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars. And don’t forget - with the Chinese Olympics coming up quickly, it might be a good read for anyone interested in learning more about China. Oh, and if you’re thinking about adopting a girl from China, I would rate this book as an absolute must read - it had so much interesting and helpful information in there about the whole process. Two thumbs up!

Havs

Hope’s Boy by Andrew Bridge was an autobiography that I really wanted to love.  The story is nothing short of a miracle: Andrew was a child raised by a mentally unstable mother (Hope) who locked him in a closet and fed him cat food, yet showered him with love.  She truly loved him, even though she couldn’t take of him physically.  The state eventually took him out of her care, and he ended up in the foster care system in California.

He spent a month in the MacLaren Hall, the Los Angeles County’s facility for foster children, and then was placed with a family who he ended up spending the rest of his childhood with.  On emancipation at age 18, he was still with that same family, which is unheard of as a regular foster child, but the family never made any move to adopt him, and he never wanted them to.  The family never treated him as one of their own, and the mother handled him very roughly at some points, although as he got older, that seemed to stop (or he at least stopped talking about it).

He eventually ends up going to college, graduates from Harvard Law School and becomes a lawyer - not a “normal” route for a foster care child, where roughly only 3% of foster care children even go to college.

As a survival mechanism, Andrew Bridge was a very withdrawn, shy child who didn’t interact with others very much, and never developed a loving bond with any of his classmates, his foster family, or really anyone at all.  His mother was in a mental institution for years, and he had virtually no contact with her for the 11 years that he was in foster care.  His grandmother tried to contact him, but because of extreme poverty, wasn’t able to very often.

Although that barrier between him and the rest of the world was one of the reasons that he survived and did as well as he did (because he never depended on others to do anything for him - he had to be independent) it also made the book into a difficult read, at least for me.  I never felt as if I truly related to him and what was going on with him - I felt as if there was a wall between me and him, and I never felt personally connected to the story.  I almost didn’t finish the book; it was a struggle to get it done.

The other problem for me was the style of writing.  I have never really liked poetry, and his style of writing would rightly be described as “poetic.”  Here’s a very brief excerpt as an example:

“As always, she had made the twin bed that morning, and now in the evening shadow, the tucked bedcover rested smooth as ink.  I flopped down, my legs hanging at the side, my ears and nose still cold from the trek across the street.  Tired, my mind emptied slowly into the raven night of the room’s deepening corners.” Page 28, “Hope’s Boy”

If that appealed to you, then you’ll love this book, because the entire book is filled with phrases like that.  To me, it was just a bit over the top.  That’s a personal preference, and I hesitate to even mention it, except it was something that bothered me throughout the book.

Overall, it was just too depressing (there never is a feel good moment in the whole book) and I never felt as if I truly got to know him, so despite my want to love it, I ended up simply liking it okay.  I’m surprised it was a New York Times Bestseller - I wouldn’t have pegged it to do that well, myself.  Did I completely miss the boat here?  Anyone else read it and want to tell me what they thought?  Leave your comments below - I want to hear from you!

3.75 out of 5 stars

Havs