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Summary
Summary
The author of the National Book Award-winning "How We Die" presents this deeply moving account of his father's life and the shadow it cast over his own. Unabridged. 5 CDs.
Author Notes
Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland was born Shepsel Ber Nudelman on December 8, 1930 in the Bronx, New York. He received a bachelor's degree from New York University in 1951 and a medical degree from Yale University in 1955. He decided to specialize in surgery and in 1958, became the chief surgical resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital. From 1962 to 1991, he was a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also taught bioethics and medical history. Before retiring to write full-time, he was a surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital from 1962 to 1992.
His books include Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, The Wisdom of the Body, The Doctors' Plague, The Uncertain Art, and the memoir Lost in America. His book, How We Die, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1994. He was also a contributing editor to The American Scholar and The New Republic. He died of prostate cancer on March 3, 2014 at the age of 83.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In his late 30s and early 40s, National Book Award winner Nuland (How We Die) was gripped by a depression so unyielding to treatment he almost underwent a lobotomy (the procedure was halted by a young resident psychiatrist who refused to listen to his superiors). But as haunting as this beginning of Nuland's memoir is, it's eclipsed in power by the story he tells of his relationship with his father, an aging Jewish immigrant whose life was a series of family tragedies and illness. Avoiding the twin traps of nostalgia and emotional overkill, Nuland details, in beautiful, stark prose, his father's harsh life in America. Meyer Nudelman worked, and failed at, a variety of jobs and was broken by the death of his first child, the death of his wife and the near-fatal illness of another son. For him, America was never a land of opportunity, and his life sank into various debilitating physical ailments and unpredictable rages that inflicted terrible damage upon his son. The memoir's deep, shocking, emotional impact comes when Nuland, a student at Yale medical school, discovers by reading a textbook that his father's physical symptoms all indicated that he was suffering his whole adult life from tertiary syphilis. The shock of this discovery-which Meyer's doctors knew, but never told him-doesn't lead to an easy resolution. "In America" the author writes, "Meyer Nudelman was a man with no past," and by the end of the book readers realize that his dreams of a happier future were also impossible. Written with enormous empathy, yet without a hint of sentimentality, Nuland's memoir is both heartbreaking and breathtaking. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A dark, distressful, and deeply felt memoir of life with father--and its aftershocks--by National Book Award-winner Nuland (How We Die, 1994, etc.). Meyer Nudelman, a Jewish immigrant from the Pale, was, to put it mildly, a difficult man: moody with an explosive temper, an outlander in his own home, full of brittle pride. His accent and physical disabilities mortified young Sherwin, while his rages smote the boy to the soul; in one memorable explosion, Nuland (Surgery/Yale School of Medicine) sees that his father, so degraded by the miserable toil of his daily life, must in turn degrade his own son with a flurry of verbal abuse. Yet the Nudelmans' stormy apartment also provided shelter, and Meyer's weakness was his power. Impressively evocative of life in the Jewish East Bronx during the 1940s, the story hinges on Sherwin's move to break away from his father's smothering emotional grasp by attending medical school at Yale. But anguishing episodes of profound melancholia (like grotesque fogs with the "muffled mocking tones of a vengeful enemy") roil his life so severely that Nuland is slated for a lobotomy while a clinical resident at Yale and barely escapes the knife. The subsequent revelation that his father is suffering from the fallout of untreated syphilis is not enough to erase his feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, his fixations and the guilt, "the din and deluge of that rampaging stampede of obsessional ideations" that resulted in Nuland's hospitalization. Lost in America probes the effect Meyer had on his life in the hope that by understanding his father Nuland might thereby understand a part of himself that has begged comprehension. The "journey" ends with a measure of balance: the author finds his own life by finding a way into and out of his father's--and if it took 70 years to achieve, the time seems short for the amount of work involved. Charring and eloquent. First printing of 40,000
Booklist Review
Nuland did not realize until he was told that in neither his National Book Award winner, How We Die (1994), nor his other books, which are full of his experiences, did he so much as mention his father. This splendid, moving memoir makes up for that previous neglect. Meyer Nudelman (Sherwin changed his surname to one less obviously Jewish) was an extraordinary ordinary man. An uneducated Russian immigrant, he labored in the needle trades in New York's garment district. His family in the southeast Bronx included his wife Vitsche, their sons Harvey and Sherwin, and his wife's mother and unmarried sister, whose wages as a fellow garment worker also went into the household. He strove to command his home, which taxed his mysterious, progressive physical debilitation and what his mother-and sister-in-law derided as lack of initiative. He asserted authority in rages that made home life always tense and volatile. Tragedy stalked him, with the early deaths of siblings, in-laws, and his first child; finally, when Sherwin was 11, Meyer lost Vitsche. As an adolescent, Sherwin became Meyer's walking companion--necessarily, for Meyer could only turn, negotiate curbs, and climb stairs slowly and with difficulty. He lived to see his sons succeed, especially Sherwin, who by winning a chief residency at Yale's hospitals breached 1950s anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, when a medical student, Sherwin discovered the cause of his father's long illness. Meyer Nudelman died without having revealed much of his early life to his son; hence, the main story here is that of Meyer in Nuland's life. But if Lost in America is less biographical of the father than Edmund Gosse's Father and Son and J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself, it is the peer of those father-son classics in literary art. --Ray Olson
Library Journal Review
Conspicuously absent from Nuland's How We Die, a National Book Award winner in 1994, the author's father dominates this new memoir. In contrast to the graceful How We Die, this book appears conflicted, crowded, and emotion-laden, with Nuland allowing readers no distance from his discomfiting exploration of his relationship with his father, Meyer. Nuland describes his father's troubles as an immigrant from Bessarabia (between Russia and Romania) who struggled with unfulfilling, low-wage work and the early death of his wife and first son. He brings his father's voice to life by reproducing his heavily accented English and occasional use of Yiddish. The journey recounted is a personal and painful one, and Nuland's attempt is not to universalize this experience but to come to terms with it for his own understanding. Raw, personal autobiographies easily find their way to readers, and this book by Nuland, a departure from some of his better-known works, will attract a different audience. Larger public libraries will want to add this to their collections.-Audrey Snowden, GSLIS (student), Simmons Coll., Boston (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
