FINALIST FOR THE JAN MICHALSKI PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
Another "pitch-perfect book of short essays" (New York Times Book
Review) from the acclaimed author of Blood of Strangers, this one
exploring the contemporary practice of medicine from the perspective of
a doctor with 25 years of experience in the ER.
In the late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
published a stunning memoir of his experiences in the highly charged
world of the ER. Presented in a series of powerful, poetic vignettes,
The Blood of Strangers became an instant classic.
Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch
from the trenches--this time from the perspective of middle age. In
portraits visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the
gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor's edge between life
and death.
From the doomed, like the Iraq vet with a brain full of shrapnel, to the
self-destructive, like the young woman who inserts a sewing needle into
her heart, to the transcendent, like the homeless Navajo artist whose
sketches charm the nurses, Huyler assembles a profound mosaic of human
suffering and grace, complemented by episodes from his personal life:
the hail that fell the night his wife gave birth, his drive through a
snowstorm to see his father in a Colorado ER, the beautiful wedding of
his childhood friend with terminal cancer. Melding hard-earned wisdom
with a poet's crystalline vision, Huyler evokes the awesome burden of
responsibility, the exhaustion, the relief of a costume disco nurse
party, and those rare occasions when the confluence of luck and science
yield, in the author's words, "moments of breathtaking greatness."
White Hot Light offers an unforgettable portrait of a field that
illuminates society at its most vulnerable, and its most elemental.
