Confessions of a Knife

By: Richard Selzer

Narrated by: Sam Gray

Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

A professor of surgery and writing at Yale, Selzer opens windows on the world of medical oddities in this collection of candid, introspective essays. His subjects are sometimes grisly but always offer tantalizing insights. Selections including Sarcophagus, Pages from a Wound-Dresser’s Diary, and Love Sick reveal Selzer’s boundless curiosity about medicine, life, and art.

©1979 David Goldman and Janet Selzer, Trustees (P)1995 Recorded Books, LLC

Better the second time around.....

I realized about a half hour or more into this recording that I had read the hardback some time before, unknown how long before. It was wonderful the first time.... it was GREAT the second time!
I have to stop and give the narrator his due: Dr Selzer was a relatively elderly man, dying at age 87 in June of 2016. He had received awards for his writing and his work, it seems. This narrator could have been Dr Selzer himself, the voice and inflection were so perfect. Being a person of the medical persuasion, I have at times been very critical of the narration, from pronunciation to inflection, of various narrators. This man was superb! I felt I was standing with Dr Selzer when he was at a bedside, and had a vivid visual image when he described various organs, their function, location, and pathology.
The descriptions of various non medical situations were also spot on, especially the one about the bird of prey close to the end.
This was SO worth the second time around! Another book that really needed to to be presented audibly to be properly appreciated!

Before there was Oliver Sacks...

there was Luria and Selzer, bringing the mysteries of neurology and medicine to the layman through rich, sometimes poetic narratives, telling the tales of ordinary people who have had extraordinary things go wrong with their bodies. There is a distance, a gruffness, in Selzer which gives him the surgeon's impersonal removal from the other humans he must cut up (sometimes one feels that Sacks could use some of this professional distance) and yet his absolute devotion to healing and helping others in the way that he has chosen comes through in every essay. Of special note is "The Discus Thrower," a piece I have taught in my English classes for nearly two decades.

(I almost never comment on the narrators, as I feel they should be irrelevant to a book review, even if the book is read aloud, but the narrator chosen for this book is perfect for Selzer's removed first person storytelling.)