Medicine Show
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/books/review/Max-t.html
When journalists are young, many are drawn to the beautiful and
exceptional, the objects of millions’ longing. Older, their empathy
turns toward those who are sick, diminished, facing the blank wall of
death. So it is that Julie Salamon, who in 1991 published a surpassingly
brilliant chronicle of the excesses of Hollywood, “The Devil’s Candy,”
about the director Brian De Palma and the making of the flop “The
Bonfire of the Vanities,” 17 years later has moved her focus from the
final cut to the final exit and given us a book on Maimonides Medical
Center in Brooklyn.
“Hospital” is an ambitious, often absorbing story. It can also be quite
funny. The account begins with Salamon’s being given unrestricted access
to the hospital and its personnel. The institution, located in the
Borough Park neighborhood, is an intriguing subject for a journalist
because it sits on the fault lines of two national controversies,
immigration and health care. In addition, Salamon, a former culture
reporter at The New York Times, wrote an earlier book on Maimonides, the
12th-century Jewish physician for whom the hospital is named.
