To Quit This Calling: Firsthand Tales of a Pediatric Pathologist

Exquisitely written in a quirky voice unlike any other, Waldstein's book fearlessly mines her life experiences. As a young wife and mother in the 60's, as well as a brilliant medical mind starting out on her tumultous career in pediatric pathology, she has quite a tale to tell -- of her complex self, her lively friends, her simultaneously wonderful and cursed family life that ultimately includes two ex-husbands. In these pages, by turns delightfully amusing and stricken by doubt and pain, Waldstein has energizing lessons for us all. But it doesn't read like lessons, it reads like what it is -- a masterful artistic expression of real life, scars and all, from a born writer.