Review by Booklist Review
In the course of six books, Gonzalez-Crussi, one of the best contemporary physician-authors, has gradually attended less to medical topics and more to matters of his own life. His seventh book is the most autobiographical of them all, yet its stories are less about Gonzalez-Crussi himself than about persons who impinged upon his life: his mother's mother, his improvident father (already indelibly etched in Gonzalez-Crussi's great essay "Taste," in The Five Senses [1989]), his indomitable mother, humble denizens of the Mexico City barrio in which he grew up, a hapless though wealthy medical school classmate (who fell destructively hard for a young prostitute), and an irritable, dying patient he encountered when working as an intern in Colorado Springs. He brings his delightfully large book-learning and larger vocabulary to bear on them all, and in the musings that afford so much of the pleasure of reading him, he relates them all to the migrant experience, from one country to another--his journey as a Mexican American--and from this world to elsewhere: the journey all humans take. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Like his popular essay collections (Notes of an Anatomist), pathologist Gonzalez-Crussi's entrancing autobiographical memoir beguiles with its elegant, precise prose, its passionate philosophizing and its fusion of medicine and metaphysics. Beginning with his childhood in a Mexican barrio, where his father, an alcoholic landlord, lost the family's fortune in rash, impractical business schemes, and ending with his liberating move to the U.S. to intern in a Colorado hospital, Gonzalez-Crussi's uncanny self-portrait revolves around the question of why he became a doctor, particularly a pathologist, one whose job is to ascertain causes of death. While there is no definitive answer, several formative experiences were crucial: working in his parents' makeshift drugstore purveying a mix of quackery and pharmaceuticals; a friend's tragic drowning; and a neighbor's pointless death in a brawl while searching bars for Gonzalez-Crussi's errant fatherevents that early implanted a keen, guilt-tinged awareness of death. With wit, dark irony and erudition lightly worn, Gonzalez-Crussi, now professor of pathology at Northwestern University Medical School, sprinkles his reminiscences with multiple references to Cervantes, Zola, Cicero, Baudelaire, Buddhist texts, Titian, Hogarth, as he meditates on the nature of memory, whether a fetus has consciousness, the interplay of chance and free will, erotic passion. Gonzalez-Crussi writes with the old-fashioned eloquence of Stendahl, but in a manner thoroughly informed by the modern age's existential anxiety, making his death-haunted autobiography challenging and a pleasure to read. Editor, Julie Grau. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Gonzalez-Crussi, a noted pathologist and author (The Day of the Dead, LJ 11/1/93), tells us that curiosity and nostalgia motivated him to compose the essays that comprise this delightful and unusual autobiography. From his youth in a Mexico City barrio through his residency in Colorado and a pathology professorship at Northwestern University, the author "tracks down half-forgotten faces, long-departed hours, and semi-erased images of a golden prime." These richly humanistic recollections of an elegant and sensitive writer show us why Gonzalez-Crussi says that his priority in capturing these scenes is to be "a man first, and a physician second." Readers will find their cultural horizons expanded by the author's humanism and erudition. For all literary memoir collections.James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In what he describes as ``discontinuous, impressionistic renderings of some scenes from a man's life,'' the author brings himself into focus through writing about others. Gonzalez-Crussi, a pathologist and head of laboratories at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago (Suspended Animation, 1995, etc.) has a flair for the unusual word (``nimiety,'' ``murine,'' etc.) and the unexpected connection, moving with facility and grace from the personal to the universal. Hes both eloquent and humble on the nature of memory, segueing into discussions of Saint Augustine and the difficulties of love. He describes his father, a failed speculator and alcoholic, and his middle-class family, which lost all it had. The central chapters of the book detail his mother's tiny street- corner pharmacy beneath the family's barrio household in Mexico City. Into this tale the author weaves the story of one Ubaldo and his unconsummated infatuation with Marisela, the grocer's daughter; the author says of Ubaldo, attributing the line to a commentator on Duchamp, that he was the great master of the uncompleted work. In emphasizing the one death that has long haunted him, that of a family friend who, searching for Gonzalez-Crussis father during one of his frequent disappearances, was accidentally shot dead upon entering a tavern, the author hints at a belief in perfection beyond an imperfect world. Of his Mexico City medical training, he mentions the stories of classmate Hector Duran, who became infatuated with a whore. Here Gonzalez-Crussi takes Titian's painting The Two Venuses as a starting point for an extended tale of obsessive sexual love. Says the author, ``The émigré and the dead share features in common,'' citing by way of proof a French proverb: `To leave is to die a little.'' For both, he says, ``there is another world, an elsewhere.' '' Humane writings of enduring value from a physician/author whose work deserves a wide audience.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
