"[Ofri] tells the profoundly affecting story of her many rites of passage on the journey from student to doctor.And she relates each transforming experience in prose so powerful in its lucidity and quest for truth that it arouses both tears and wonder." Booklist, ALA "As Ofri relates in this marvelous book, becoming a doctor is a complex process. Her gifted storytelling discloses a variety of patients, their medical needs, and the doctor-hospital-patient interface.well-crafted prose.Highly recommended for most medical collections and where patrons also enjoy works by Abraham Verghese and Atul Gawande." Library Journal These essays. resonate with insight, intelligence, humor and an extraordinary sensitivity to both the patients she treated in this inner-city facility and the staff she worked with.
Ofri brings to this memoir a combination of medical information and some very expressive writing.The pieces in this powerful collection are tied together by the struggle of a clearly gifted physician to master the complexities of healing. Publishers Weekly "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 (M.D.) "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 "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 "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.