Frank Huyler, White Hot Light, in conversation with Danielle Ofri

Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - 6:00pm

Bookworks hosts author Dr. Frank Huyler in conversation with bestselling author Dr. Danielle Ofri, editor of the Bellevue Literary Review.

RSVP to rsvp@bkwrks.com for the Zoom link. Please purchase White Hot Light from Bookworks below.

About the book:

Another "pitch-perfect book of short essays" (New York Times Book Review) from the acclaimed author of Blood of Strangers, this one exploring the contemporary practice of medicine from the perspective of a doctor with 25 years of experience in the ER.

In the late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, published a stunning memoir of his experiences in the highly charged world of the ER. Presented in a series of powerful, poetic vignettes, The Blood of Strangers became an instant classic.

Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from the trenches--this time from the perspective of middle age. In portraits visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor's edge between life and death.

From the doomed, like the Iraq vet with a brain full of shrapnel, to the self-destructive, like the young woman who inserts a sewing needle into her heart, to the transcendent, like the homeless Navajo artist whose sketches charm the nurses, Huyler assembles a profound mosaic of human suffering and grace, complemented by episodes from his personal life: the hail that fell the night his wife gave birth, his drive through a snowstorm to see his father in a Colorado ER, the beautiful wedding of his childhood friend with terminal cancer. Melding hard-earned wisdom with a poet's crystalline vision, Huyler evokes the awesome burden of responsibility, the exhaustion, the relief of a costume disco nurse party, and those rare occasions when the confluence of luck and science yield, in the author's words, "moments of breathtaking greatness." 

White Hot Light offers an unforgettable portrait of a field that illuminates society at its most vulnerable, and its most elemental.-- Publishers Weekly, starred review

Frank Huyler is an emergency physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the author of the The Blood of Strangers, The Laws of Invisible Things, and Right of Thirst. His poetry has appeared in The Atlantic MonthlyThe Georgia Review, and Poetry, among others.

Danielle Ofri is a primary care doctor at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, and editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is When We Do Harm, A Doctor Confronts Medical Error.

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White Hot Light: Twenty-Five Years in Emergency Medicine By Frank Huyler Cover Image
$16.99
Email or call for price.
ISBN: 9780062937339
Published: Harper Perennial - August 25th, 2020

When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error By Danielle Ofri, MD Cover Image
$26.95
Email or call for price.
ISBN: 9780807037881
Published: Beacon Press - March 23rd, 2020

Right of Thirst: A Novel By Frank Huyler Cover Image
$15.99
ISBN: 9780061687549
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Harper Perennial - April 21st, 2009

The Laws of Invisible Things: A Novel By Frank Huyler Cover Image
$23.00
ISBN: 9780312424527
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Picador - March 1st, 2005