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Robert Klitzman, A Year-Long Night: Tales of a Medical Internship (Viking Press, 1989) Reissued by Penguin in paperback in 1990. Robert Klitzman wrote A Year-Long Night as a hybrid memoir/manual of his time as an intern in medical school. He firmly believes that his experience could benefit readers on the same track, but it seems likely that his target audience would be a bit turned off by not only the negativity in the title, but in many parts of the book as well. Though Klitzman does know quite a bit about the long process of medical training, his account of the experience is bland and formulaic. He rarely enlivens the text with true anecdotes that would provide a window into the author's own nature. After all, if you're going to call the experience of the medical internship "a year-long night," you should reveal a little about your night in particular. Now an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Co-Director at the Center for Bioethics at Columbia University, Klitzman's interests have veered into privacy issues in medical and genetic records, the psychological effects of HIV infection, and the ethics of conducting medical research and importing Western technologies into other cultures. In fact, the most captivating part of the book is the epilogue, where the author describes his experiences in Papua New Guinea studying the gut-wasting disease Kuru. But he has another book about that, The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Disease, so perhaps intrigued readers should simply move on to that title. MORE: Center for Bioethics at Columbia University |
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