Life on the Ground Floor

Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine

De: Dr. James Maskalyk

Narrado por: Dr. James Maskalyk

Canada Reads 2019 Longlist.

Winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Do no harm is our most important rule, but we break it all the time trying to do good.

In this deeply personal book, winner of the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, humanitarian doctor and activist James Maskalyk reflects upon his extensive experience in emergency medicine. Splitting his time between a trauma centre in Toronto's inner city and the largest teaching hospital in Addis Ababa, he discovers that though the cultures, resources and medical challenges of the hospitals may differ, they are linked indelibly by the ground floor: the location of their emergency rooms. Here, on the ground floor, is where Maskalyk confronts his fears and doubts about medicine, and witnesses our mourning and laughter, tragedies and hopes, the frailty of being and the resilience of the human spirit.

Yet, he is swept most intimately into this story of "human aliveness" not as a physician, but as a grandson carrying for his grandfather, now in his 90s.

Masterfully written and artfully structured, Life on the Ground Floor is more than just an emergency doctor's memoir - it's a meditation on health and sickness, on when to hang on tight, and when to let go.

©2017 James Maskalyk (P)2018 Doubleday Canada

Reseñas de la Crítica

"The problem with memoirs, especially when they are written by Western doctors heading off to Africa for work, is they can be self-indulgent and messianic in tone. Dr. James Maskalyk deftly avoids that trap in his highly acclaimed first book, Six Months in Sudan...[and] he's done so again in his new memoir, Life on the Ground Floor.... [His] idealism and passion are obvious...but the strength of the book is that it captures the viscera, real and symbolic, of the ER - its sights, sounds, smells, pulse - without romanticizing the work.... Ultimately, that's what the book is about - making connections, across continents, culture and social classes, and clinging to the joyful moments that can be found amid the horror." (The Globe and Mail)

"A master of the medical memoir...Dr. James Maskalyk has a remarkable talent for description and detail.... [He] is entrancingly interesting...and his talent is offering serial nuggets of insight into things we rarely consider.... What makes Maskalyk so [listenable]? He is a noticer of small things, a person on whom nothing is lost." (Toronto Star)

"With his moving and penetrating account of his experiences as an emergency room doctor in hospitals from Toronto to Ethiopia, Maskalyk joined a centuries-old tradition of doctors who write well." (Maclean's)

"Austere as the Sudanese landscape, plangent as a ballad, this book has poetry in it along with pain." (The Washington Post)

The author’s sincerity

Well written, well performed musings on the life of an emergency room MD in Ethiopia and Toronto.