Real Lives, Real Medicine

In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different type of doctor – the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who could reach unreachable patients. But when a new admission to the critical care unit almost died during his first night on call, he found himself scrambling. Visions of mastery faded as he prayed to simply survive a brutally demanding and challenging near-year as a new doctor.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician’s First Year by Matt McCarthy (Crown, $27.00, 323 pages)

“After 10 months of being an intern, I no longer experienced life like a normal person… I now viewed everything through the lens of medicine. It wasn’t something I had planned or particularly wanted, it just happened.”

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly is a very well written, engaging and entertaining look at what Dr. Matt McCarthy – a one-time minor league baseball pitcher who wrote the memoir The Odd Man Out – calls the “wonderfully insane” world of medicine. While serving as an intern in New York City, McCarthy was to practice – in the most literal sense – at both the massive Columbia/NYU Medical Center with 2,478 beds and the small 201-bed Allen Hospital (Motto: “Amazing things are happening here.”). McCarthy experienced a needle stick early on while treating a patient with HIV and Hepatitis C. In this sense, he became a patient himself, receiving prophylactic treatment and resting while waiting to find out if he had infected himself with one or both of these conditions.

McCarthy draws on the reader’s empathy by focusing not just on himself but also on two infirm patients: Benny, a middle-aged, seemingly healthy individual waiting endlessly for a heart transplant donor; and Carl Gladstone, a university professor whose life is nearly destroyed by a sudden heart attack. We see that, as with many things in life, luck and timing may override fate.

McCarthy goes from being a resident “who had been practicing medicine for less than a week” to a full-fledged hospital physician and Cornell University assistant professor of medicine. It’s an amazing journey, one well worth experiencing.

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

Note: If you enjoyed reading Complications, Better, or Being Mortal by Dr. Atul Gawande or One Doctor by Brendan Reilly, M.D., you will want to consider reading The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly.

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Advertisement

Best Of All Possible Worlds

Music Review: ‘Pop/Art’ by Adrian Bourgeois (Disc Two)

Californian Adrian Bourgeois apparently knows where he comes from.

The second disc of Bourgeois’ 2014 release Pop/Art contains twelve songs that run 53 or so minutes. There’s much to like, and much that is reminiscent of a late ’60s/early ’70s pop sound and sensibility that puts today’s popular music to shame. And, a great deal of this features a unique and refined combination of The Byrds (especially the second track, “Better”) and the Beach Boys (especially the fourth track, “The Howling Wind”) with a Phil Spector-produced type of backdrop (especially the fifth track, “The Lost and the Free”). In terms of modern comparisons, it is like Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), with a higher voice and a tad less edge – though don’t let the voice fool you (if you look more closely at the lyrics you’ll find plenty of edge).

Take this from the seventh selection on Disc Two’s “Picture Frames”: “Now there’s poison in the wishing well/Poison in the wishing well/So you failed to say/And I’ve been drinking it all day/But it’s so nice to see you anyway/You and your picture frame.” Damn fine.

And there appear to be some Beatles influence at work as well, particularly in the sixth track “Parachutes”, in which the hooks and transitions are so smooth and cleverly constructed that Sir Paul McCartney comes to mind.

This CD is eminently listenable. This “album”, if you can still call it that, works as background music for a party or resonates at a much deeper, personal, level (should the listener choose to consider it in that manner). Many of these tracks could be included in a soundtrack for the right film.

Heavier on piano than guitar and, as stated earlier, produced on the borderline of being over-produced, the songs begin to run together by the end. One wonders if a double CD release was prudent or if some of these songs should have been saved for a follow-up release. That being said, they do hang together thematically.

The brass at the end of “Celebrate the News” (same title but different lyrics from the Beach Boys song), the blusier aforementioned “The Lost and the Free”, another change up in “Picture Frame”, and a solo-acoustic “Rainy Day Parade” help. However, by the third and second-to-last tracks on Disc Two (“Still Life” and “Sunflower”) the sound meanders a bit with the word “redundant” coming to mind. Although solid lyrics do save it from redundancy if one is willing to listen closely.

Pop/Art should appeal to a broad audience. Several of these songs could be played on WXRT in Chicago, which those of you from that area know is the only station for music lovers. It almost goes without saying – although I will say it, that Pop/Art is a very solid work of “Pop/Art”.

Well recommended.

Dave Moyer

Mr. Moyer is a public school administrator, a drummer who has never played with the Rolling Stones, The Who or the Beach Boys, and is the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel. He was provided with a review copy of Pop/Art.

Pop/Art can be purchased here: http://adrianbourgeois.bandcamp.com/

You can read a review of Pop/Art, Disc One here:

https://josephsreviews.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/everybody-knows-it-was-me/

A New Audio-book Giveaway!

Thanks to Anna at Hachette Audio, we will be giving away three audio book copies of The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar.   This is an unabridged 9-CD set that has a value of $34.98.   You can see a video trailer-preview for this book at the Twelve Books website (Google it).   The following are some comments about this unique non-fiction book.

Sheena Iyengar’s work on choice and how our minds deal with it has been groundbreaking, repeatedly surprising, and enormously important.   She is someone we need to listen to.   Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Better and Complications

No one asks better questions, or comes up with more intriguing answers.   Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers

As you take exciting steps into this wide-ranging exploration of the choices we make, you will traverse the worlds of psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, business, public policy and medicine.   Malcolm Gladwell popularized some of Professor Iyengar’s research in Blink, but that is just a glimmer of what readers will discover in The Art of Choosing.

The author’s objective in these pages is a great one:  to help us become better choosers, with greater self-awareness of our biases and values.   She is tackling nothing less than the subtext of our lives – what we are thinking when we make choices; how our environment influences us; and how choice drives, frustrates, sustains and satisfies us.

You will learn why we need choice in our lives to feel control and contentment… (yet) we can sometimes be paralyzed by too many choices.   Unquestionably, it is one of the best books I’ve had the privilege of publishing.   Jonathan Karp, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, TWELVE

It’s easy to enter this book giveaway.   All you need to do is post a comment here or send an e-mail (using the subject line The Art of Choosing) to Josephsreviews@gmail.com .   This will count as a first entry.   For a second contest entry, tell us what the hardest choice was that you had to make in your life, and why it seemed so difficult at the time.   That’s it.

This contest will run until Midnight PST on Friday, May 7, 2010.   In order to enter, you must be a resident of the United States or Canada, with a residential address.   Audio books cannot be mailed to P.O. boxes.  

Good luck and good listening!