DOI: 10.1097/SAP.0b013e3181b597d8
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Issn Print: 0148-7043
Publication Date: 2009/09/01
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Excerpt
Robert M. Goldwyn, MD. Retired Not Dead: Thoughts Plastic Surgical and Otherwise. London: Artnik Books; 2008. 295 pages. $29.99
Robert Goldwyn had a long career as a prominent journal editor, and a longer career as a practicing plastic surgeon. His longest career has been that of being an observant, intelligent, and articulate human being. This last career is still in progress.
Dr. Goldwyn brings thought and insight from all these realms to this book of essays. He also brings a well-crafted style of writing that we could all see evolve during his 25 years of editorials in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
In preparing this review, I initially started a list of memorably wrought sentences. Then, I began to list the topics of the essays. Next, I thought that the essays could be sorted out according to whether they described the past, present, or future. I began to wonder if these topics connected along the temporal divisions. I then stopped all note taking and read the book through with great pleasure. A more methodical reviewer may return to some of these analyses to help explain the great richness of this book, but I recommend that the reader proceed to it with no particular guide except for its marvelous author. May the book have many readers; it is a wonder and a treasure.
The collection is more than the sum of its parts. There is a genre of fiction that almost abandons plot to describe the details of daily life, the reaction of characters to these details, and the attempts of the characters to understand themselves and the details and reactions of their lives. Such fiction generally avoids large murderous albinos, secret societies, and their conspiracies, great plagues, alien abductions, and serial killers. These plotless books of days can achieve, however, a depth of portrayal that can render fictional characters with great imitation of life. Joyce's Ulysses1 is a famous example of such a work, and Unamuno's novel Mist2 may provide an even subtler achievement of this effect.
Goldwyn's collection creates such a character, one with the complex memory and foreshortened future of age, but one whose continued explorations of life and voyages of thought portray a living consciousness at a point in its life's time. All the specific pleasures of the book add up to this richly crafted characterization. The reader is all the better for having made this remarkable acquaintance.
