Mark De Rond

This review originally appeared on my blog at www.gimmethatbook.com.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing this review copy!

The author starts out by saying that this book was never supposed to be published, due to the subject matter and the way it was perceived to be handled. That only added more intrigue to the story, to me, and I was eager to begin reading.

The story is akin to the book/TV series MASH, with beleaguered surgeons, war all around them, stress, and dark ways to relieve the boredom. There is a great deal of loss of life complicated by military rules and the Hippocratic Oath – beware, as the injuries are horrific and discussed in great detail.

The author is British; so I expected his writing style to be a bit different from American writers. In fact, I even welcomed it, as I look forward to non-American cadences and dialects in books. What I hadn’t bargained for was uneven writing with obscure phrasing. At times it’s hard to understand who is saying what, and there was no deep insight made on the choices the doctors had to make. At the 75% mark I realized I had not really absorbed anything meaningful except that war is hell, these surgeons were doing the best they could, and sometimes there was strangeness (the usual black humor and Christmas in July) to help the soldier’s mental states. The same type of story was repeated over and over again (wounded too badly, euthanized with pain meds/crashing boredom dealt with by playing card games and trying to stay cool in the desert/occasional platitude about life) without variance or emotion.

Somehow this writer managed to make a wartime hospital seem dull. The characters are an amalgam, and so perhaps could not have been made more detailed; but I think it would have been better if he had given a little more detail about why they were doctors, what made this tour of duty different from others, etc.

It’s a shame that such an important subject matter was reduced to an unsatisfying bite of pablum, as there is a need to understand what the military deals with during extended conflicts. Heart of Darkness, Catch-22, and On Call In Hell expressed the story in a more readable and gratifying way. I gave up at the abovementioned 75% mark; something I don’t do often, but I just didn’t want to waste any more time. Great subject – bad handling.… (más)

Book received from NetGalley.

This was a book I couldn't put down, I read it straight through. It was written by a Doctor who was sent to Helmand Provance to see what life was like for the medics stationed there. It was never definitively stated if he was there to work or to observe. The book pulls no punches, it's extremely grim especially since they are also treating the locals, including children, who are caught up in the fighting. Much of it reminded me of M.A.S.H. the movie/book, not the TV show. There are some funny moments and there is quite a bit of "graveyard" humor in its pages. I enjoyed reading about these doctors who treat our soldiers without much of the extras found in the hospitals back home.… (más)

This book presents a raft of moderately to fairly interesting facts and figures about sport, interspersed with a smaller amount of moderately to fairly interesting facts and figures about business, in such a way as to invite the reader to draw comparisons and parallels between them.

However, what it doesn’t manage to do at all convincingly is marshal all these facts and figures into a set of coherent arguments that make a point. So, although I found it interesting, there were quite a few moments when I wondered why I was reading a particular passage, ie what the author was trying to tell me.

For me, the book didn’t offer any new insights into team selection or performance; rather it seemed to rehash existing wisdom about teams. For instance I didn’t need to read 146 pages to be told in the conclusion that “team leaders need to understand the idiosyncrasies, ambitions and anxieties of those in their charge”, or that “people do what they do for their own reasons, not yours”.

There are many business books on the market. Although it is interesting, this one doesn’t offer enough new insights to justify the time spent reading it.… (más)