Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505190045
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY SIDNEY BARRITT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Short
\ I was prepared to be very critical of Dr. McCarthy's work. After all, Perri Klass' "Baby Doctor," published two years ago, was, I thought, an engaging and inspiring account of a woman's journey toward becoming a pediatrician.
Could another woman's stories of medical school at Harvard and pediatric training at Boston Children's Hospital compare? I thought not.
And the first several chapters did little to soften my pre-formed opinion. Routine stuff, routinely told. Then came a story that exhumed a buried memory.
How well she told that tale and captured the mixed feeling that comes when success is tinged more than a little with failure: a disease conquered by all objective criteria but the patient still ill, more sick at heart than anything else. Each story that followed evoked a different memory but with the same uniting them.
The book's title is an inspired choice and it is clearly allegorical. The physiology of the heartbeat is only superficially the theme of these stories. Symbolically, the heart is who we are and what we are about. And any doubt about what this woman has become is surely summed up in the final story wherein she gives birth to her own child.
Any comparison to similar works and other authors would be unfair to one or another. McCarthy's focus is different enough and her gifts as an author are more than sufficient to make her stories worth hearing.
Sidney Barritt is a Roanoke physician.
by CNB