cover image A Year-Long Night

A Year-Long Night

Robert Klitzman. Viking Books, $17.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-670-81777-1

A Yale Medical School graduate, Klitzman joins the ranks of young doctors whose emotionally charged first year of internship impels them to record their initial experiences of suffering, healing and death. Each of his medical rotations is represented by short episodes, usually centered around a single patient. Indeed, what distinguishes this account from others of its kind is not only literary promise, but the author's interest in patients as human beings with distinct personalities whose identities and wishes he respectsqualities that should serve him well in his present residency in psychiatry at a New York hospital. A particularly interesting chapter is devoted to a year spent in a New Guinea village researching a disease linked with cannibalism. (Feb.)