Raising the Dead - Hardcover

Selzer, Richard

3.77

66 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 187973611X ISBN 13: 9781879736115

Publisher: Whittle Direct Books, 1993

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The former surgeon writes of his own near-death experience after being diagnosed with Legionnaires' disease and lapsing into a coma. The fragility of health and robustness of imagination merge when this seemingly healthy man's legs collapse suddenly beneath him, propelling him into a 23-day coma triggered by Legionnaire's Disease. Here, Selzer relives his illness, allowing the reader a highly personal glimpse into his delirium as he skates the line between life and death. This tale of survival remains unsentimental as Selzer grounds what was surely a terrifying experience in humor, emphasized by use of third person narrative.

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About the Author:

Richard Selzer is the author of numerous books and articles. He is a former surgeon and professor of surgery. Selzer taught writing at Yale University and is the recipient of dozens of awards and honors, including a Pushcart Prize, National Magazine Award (for his essays), an American Medical Writer's Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. His work has been published in New American Review, Esquire, Harper's, and other periodicals.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The near-fatal illness of surgeon-turned-writer Selzer (Down From Troy, 1992; etc.), told with his usual precision and grit. On March 31, 1992, while working in his study, Selzer felt his knees buckle, watched paramedics bustle him into an ambulance...and awoke 23 days later from a coma triggered, as it transpired, by Legionnaire's Disease. Here, he recounts his illness, in part by fretting over just how to go about recounting it. He begins obliquely, telling how 19th-century French novelist Fanny d'Arbley described her own breast surgery (a harrowing account, with the terrified surgeon working without benefit of anesthesia). Can Selzer, another ``convalescent scrivener,'' follow in her brave footsteps? Yes and no. His descriptions of coma--during which he was not dead to mentation but, rather, ``a gardener digging into the earth who makes a decision to lower himself to the underworld''--shine; so too do his accounts of post-coma disorientation, during which he imagined himself to be a reluctant novice in a medieval monastery, or an explorer escaping from Khartoum. Wonderful cameos of doctors, nurses, and visitors pepper the narrative, which is told in the third person, a sign of the ``independence'' of the illness. But what to make of the text's pivotal event, when on April 23rd at 1:38 p.m., Selzer is declared dead for ten minutes? At times, the author seems to take this as a genuine death (although it tells him nothing of the afterlife); at others, he talks of it as a literary conceit thrown in for effect (``a writer will go to any lengths to captivate and entertain his readers....So it is decided that, after 23 days in the intensive care unit, I died''). Such ambiguity--in which, one suspects, Fanny d'Arbley would never have indulged--deflects the otherwise razor- sharp cut of Selzer's tale. For the most part: an unsentimental, often funny account of life on the verge of death. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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