Direct Red

How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands? What is it like to cut into someone else's body? What is it like to stand by, powerless, while someone dies because of the incompetence of your seniors? How do you tell a beautiful young man who seems perfectly fit that he has only a few days left to live? Gabriel Weston worked in the big-city hospitals of the twenty-first century; a woman in a world dominated by Alpha males. Her world was one of disease, suffering and extraordinary pressure where a certain moral ambiguity and clinical detachment were necessary tools for survival. Startling and honest, her account combines a fierce sense of human dignity with compassion and insight, illuminating scenes of life and death the rest of us rarely glimpse.

ISBN 0099520699   Pages 192 ISBN13 9780099520696 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 140 Publisher Vintage   Published in London Imprint Vintage   Height (mm) 198 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 130 Publication date 04 Feb 2010   Spine width (mm) 12 DEWEY 617.092   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

A miniature masterpiece The Times A beautiful, haunting and upsetting book. Weston's prose is cool and elegant Sunday Telegraph Direct Red is Gabriel Weston's memoir of the years she spent pursuing a surgical career... She examines these with an honesty that is both brave and uncomfortable Guardian What a terrific book. Gabriel Weston's voice is so seductive; her wisdom so fresh and earned, and unimpaired by sentimentality, and yet you sense her empathy - and scintillating honesty - behind every well-turned sentence. She leaves you feeling that if push came to shoveyou'd want to be operated on by her A curiously thrilling read, written with an elegance of expression heightened by both its clarity and economy. Weston slices into sentences with scalpel-like precision Observer Concise, literate, truthful and often moving... as well-written and sensitive an account, by a decent, cultivated and highly intelligent person, of the glories and miseries of the practice as are likely ever to read Literary Review Her wisdom, empathy, morality and self-awareness are very revealing... Her writing is as incisive, precise and clean as keyhole surgery The Times This is a compassionate, front-line report from what can often seem like alien territory. Daily Telegraph Summer Reads

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