4 out of 4 stars
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Out of The Third World, by Ashok Sharma, tells about the author's experiences, as an immigrant student in the United Kingdom. Sharma is an Indian born in Tanzania. In the late 1960s, he arrived at the Gatwick Airport in England with the ambition to become a medical doctor. He registered for A levels in a British college, and afterwards, he was faced with the challenges involved in getting admitted into a medical school. This book is chiefly about Sharma's survival in England, unveiling how he eventually succeeded in receiving "the certificate of full registration as a medical practitioner from the General Medical Council of Great Britain."
The book is coherent and easy to read. It has two sections, namely book one and book two. The first section is about how Sharma studied and passed his A-level exams, and section two shows his experiences in medical school. I appreciate the author's ability to describe events, places, and people vividly. What I like most is that the book feels like a novel. Sharma put his experiences together in a fictional form; there are narrative and intriguing dialogues. He provides a true story with a solid plot and interesting twists. Though the beginning is somewhat flat, it becomes suspenseful from the middle.
Being entertaining, the book provides a lot of information about the specialties of medicine, including the handling of some serious health problems. Hence, it'll be useful for those aspiring to be medical doctors, but if you're fainthearted, I advise you to skip it because it tells about the dissecting of human organs and the internal organs of surgery patients.
Furthermore, Out of The Third World features political and Third World immigration issues in the UK in the late sixties, such as "Enoch Powell's apocalyptic-sounding anti-immigration campaign." The book is engaging and full of valuable lessons. From one of the author's experiences, he learned a bitter lifelong lesson not to commit a crime at the demand of a friend because such a friend is worse than an enemy. I concur with that. Included in the story, in the second section, are Sharma's sex adventures, but there are no explicit sex scenes.
In conclusion, I rate the book 4 out of 4 stars. It doesn't deserve less than 4 stars because it's fascinating and enlightening. Sincerely, I enjoyed reading it. It was well edited; I found just one grammar error and one spelling error. I recommend it to anyone in medical school or anyone who wants to venture into medicine.
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Out of The Third World
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