Reviews for Controversies in the practice of medicine

The average rating for Controversies in the practice of medicine based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-12 00:00:00 DMITRII BURAVLEV This book was a delight. I had read two of Mallon's books - "Stolen Words" (on plagiarism) and "A Book of One's Own" (people and their diaries) - quite some time ago, and found them both charming and fascinating. So maybe the charm of these essays shouldn't have been a surprise. But I was bowled over, both by the breadth and depth of Mallon's coverage. Not to engage in hagiography, but he comes close to my notion of a perfect reviewer. In many instances his evaluations are a more eloquent expression of my own thoughts about a particular book or author. And in those cases where our evaluations were different, his views are expressed with a persuasive clarity that stimulates me to go back to the work in question and see what I might have missed. He's smart, erudite, witty, someone who has obviously read widely, with catholic tastes and a broad-ranging curiosity. But, refreshingly, his criticism comes squarely from the point of view of someone who obviously wants to give the writer the benefit of the doubt. Which is not to say that he pulls his punches, but there is none of the besetting sin that afflicts most critics - the cruel putdown whose primary aim is to remind you of the critic's own smartness. Nor does he ever give the sense of targeting someone solely because of their success. A good illustration of what I mean is his essay "Snow Falling on Readers", which examines the work of David Guterson. It is characteristic of Mallon's approach that, to understand the success of Guterson's biggest hit, he takes it on himself to read and discuss the author's entire work. Having done so, he ultimately finds it wanting. Characteristically, his summation is gentle, but damning nonetheless: "I must confess that the real mystery to me is not what happened to Carl Heine aboard his fishing boat but just what on earth the PEN/Faulkner jurors were thinking - and beyond that, what all the local book-group readers who have made this No.1 can be seeing. A majority of these group readers - a discerning constituency who do much to keep literary fiction alive in America - are women, and it's the female characters in Guterson's books who are flimsy to the point of mere functionality, projections of male desire and indecision." Compared with the mean-spirited hatchet job on Guterson that appears in "A Reader's Manifesto", which cannot escape giving the impression of being motivated by resentment at another's success, Mallon's evaluation reads like genuine literary criticism. Which is not to say that all is high-minded and serious. Elsewhere in the same essay he makes the following throwaway, but devastatingly on-point, remark: "I have been against homeschooling ever since that family-taught girl won the national spelling bee a few years back. This child who became such a point of pride to homeschooling parents couldn't stop shouting and jumping around and crowing about her moment of onstage accomplishment. I didn't care if she could spell 'arrhythmia' backwards; this unsocialized kid needed Miss Crabtree to put her in the corner." Essays I particularly enjoyed were those on the David Leavitt-Stephen Spender lawsuit, on Howard Norman (whose 'The Bird Artist' I have always considered the antidote to the appalling 'Shipping News'), on Will Self, on Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full". The essays on letters from his readers, on obituaries, on the ups and downs of the 'author book tour', and on the challenges of writing historical fiction are equally fascinating. But what clinched things, and what earned this book its fifth star is the essay "Enough about Me", which expresses his civilized but eloquent antipathy to the "emergence of memoir as a hot new publishing commodity". Someone who mirrors my own thoughts on the matter, and can express them far more eloquently than I could. What's not to love?

Review # 2 was written on 2019-02-25 00:00:00 steven kasel I remember one (paraphrased) line from this collection: something in an essay about obituaries. ". . . and the first paragraph always ends with the same verb." If you consider this careful whipping together of style and substance with a hint of allegory to be a genus of wit, you are or were in all likelihood an English major, and you may enjoy these columns.