4 out of 4 stars
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I am not sure where to start, what to write, and where to end. Thoughts are flooding to my mind, and I am afraid that I will end up not writing a review, but a book. Though it is pretty difficult, I will try my best to keep this review as short as possible.
Days of the Giants by R J Petrella is a medium sized book that has only 392 pages. The book is divided into 67 chapters, and these are grouped into 6 parts. Each part consists of about 10 chapters. This book is categorized under the C/T/M/H genre, but it has crimes, politics, romance, a historical component, and a bit of almost everything.
Slater Barnes, a medical student who is concerned about the spiritual aspect of being a doctor, decides to go to a public health care facility, the Boston City Hospital, for his internship. With this decision he loses his long term girlfriend, and also at the same time he is diagnosed to have a deadly, brain aneurysm. Yet, he goes on with his decision, and finally becomes the saviour of the hospital and the hero of all the staff members of the hospital.
I did my own research, and came to know that there has been actually a public hospital named ‘Boston City Hospital’ in Boston, and it has been merged with the Boston University Medical Centre in 1996 to form the Boston Medical Centre, which is still functioning. Since the author has been living in Boston, and has been practising medicine since early 1990s, he might have seen the conflicts regarding merging the two hospitals. He takes us to that situation via this fiction.
This book is related to me personally in more than one way. I am a final year medical student who is awaiting to go for the internship in a few more months. And here we have a totally free healthcare system, including medical education, in which everyone is treated same without any exceptions. Recently there was an attempt to merge private medical education into the free system, but all the medical professionals raised against it, and the attempt was failed. So, for me, this book is not just some fiction.
The book is written in narrative style. There are actually two narrators, Slater Barnes, and his father who is looking upon from heaven. This was a new experience for me, and it was pretty impressive. What was witnessed and done by Slater is told by him, and what he could not possibly been aware of is told by his father. So, the reader can get the whole picture without raising the question, “How did Slater become aware of that?”
The scenic and background descriptions were superb. They took me actually to the scene, and I could easily visualize everything. It was more like watching a movie rather than reading a book. The descriptions about people including their minor details and actions made the story livelier. Action as well as humour were included wherever necessary and appropriate.
It was such an interesting read that made me reluctant to keep it away even to take down notes for this review. The simple language and the short chapters aided a quick read. Though the book carried tremendous details about hospital setup, political issues, and personal issues of the characters, I never felt tired or bored. And I did not see any of those as unnecessary.
Occasionally I spotted some mistakes such as use of wrong words and wrong punctuations, but they did not cause even a slight interruption to my reading experience. Anyway, I am not so sure that this book will be interesting to a non-medical personnel to the extent that it was interesting to me, with all the extensive medical details. But the author has not kept them in dark, and he has always explained the medical terms without disrupting the flow of the story.
I would heartily give this a rating of 4 out of 4 stars. I would have gone for a higher rating if I could. I recommend this book for all the physicians, and who are interested in medicine, politics, as well as the readers of C/T/M/H genre.
I will end my review with a quotation from the book. I really liked that statement, and I think that is pretty much true.
******The problem is that docs weren’t trained to band together and fight the establishment. It’s really unnatural for them, like Lindy had said to me. They were trained to survive by themselves, outcompete each other, and become the establishment
Days of the Giants
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