Reviews for
Mastering the Knife
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Mastering the Knife reaches beyond the purely personal to convey something of the people, period, and places that made the author. Working sometimes like a memoirist and sometimes like an anthropologist or ethnographer, he lifts a veil on the rites, rituals, rules (written and unspoken), and language of medicine, especially surgery.
Meguid is a masterful storyteller, and the story that he seems to have lighted on is about the peculiar mixture of temperament, intellect, skill, circumstance, discipline and luck that go into the making of a remarkable life. Some powerful forces are arrayed against him, of course: racism and xenophobia as well as parental cruelty, neglect and abandonment. The author gets a lot of narrative momentum from the sense of pushing against the forces—even the ones inside his own head—agitating for defeat and failure.
Scenes are captured the drama of a particular moment in very few words. Much of the dialogue is crisp. Sometimes it’s laugh-out-loud funny. Whenever the author turns his descriptive powers on a place—whether landscape or structure—the writing turns vivid and evocative. Much of the prose about the practice of medicine or surgery, as seen through the eyes of a student, is precise and memorable. The reader finds herself being educated through Meguid’s eyes.
We follow him to the prestigious London University Medical School where he is the ultimate outsider, an Egyptian in a lily white, elitist English world. But he prevails, and in the end, Meguid finds belonging, love, affection, and a fulfilling career that takes him to Harvard in historical Boston for a planned surgical residency. Throughout medical school in London Dr. Meguid illuminates a path filled with rejection, longing, sadness, relentless pursuit, and ultimately fulfillment, joy and unbridled success. You owe it to yourself to join him on his life’s adventure.”
I want to tell you how much I enjoyed Mastering the Knife even more than Roots & Branches.
Your writing is powerful and elegant. You keep me personally and emotionally connected throughout. You know how to tell such a compelling story, just at the right pace, with just the right amount of narration and back story to keep me going. I had my choice of reading Edith Wharton or you and chose Mastering the Knife.
I would like to thank you for writing Mastering the Knife. I have enjoyed it so much as my bedtime reading. I kept staying up too late and had to ration myself. I relived it all with you!
Having just finished Michael Meguid’s two books–Roots & Branches and Mastering the Knife–I was totally overtaken with the journey that the author has taken. It is a powerful story portraying the turns and events of life and a truly heart rendering experience. I look forward to Dr. Meguid’s next book. I highly recommend these two fabulous books. –5 stars.
“To be a successful surgeon, you must have the eyes of a hawk, the heart of a lion, and the hands of a lady”. In the sequel to ‘Roots and Branches’, ‘Mastering the Knife’ continues the riveting saga of a young man’s search for identity and his overriding ambition to become a surgeon. The book chronicles his years of arduous study and training at the prestigious University College London, interspersed with moving accounts of how he met ‘the love of his life, the friends he made, his short trip back to his beloved Egypt, and the continued stress of dealing with his cold, critical German mother. We, the readers, know he eventually ‘made it’, but exactly how… well, we will just have to wait to read the third volume of ‘Surgeon and Lover’.