Making the Cut: A Surgeon’s Stories of Life on the Edge (Mohamed Khadra, Random House, $34.95 tpb, ISBN 97817416667325, September) **1/2

Making the Cut is the autobiography of Melbourne surgeon Mohamed Khadra, who takes us through the progressions of his surgical career from intern to resident, and from private to academic practice. He also relates his experience as a patient in his own hospital in what is ultimately a scathing critique of Australia’s underresourced public healthcare system. Dotted through the book are numerous patient case studies along the lines of ‘John Smith was a 60-year-old man with a benign prostatic obstruction.’ (Khadra specialised as a urologist so there are lots of case studies about erectile dysfunction and prostate cancer.) Khadra takes considerable liberties with fact (obviously there are confidentiality issues to consider), setting his story in the fictional ‘Victoria Hospital’ and presenting ‘amalgams of characters and events.’ In the author’s note he explains: ‘This book is no more a biography or a faithful historical account of my life as a surgeon then Monet’s paintings of Giverny are engineering drawings of a Japanese bridge.’ Khadra’s ‘literary pretentions’, however, are to the book’s detriment. Rather than entertaining with juicy ‘insider’s details’ about the cut and thrust of surgery, this reader feels that Khadra spends too much time philosophising about the nature of surgery and passing judgement on the actions of his colleagues.

Andrea Hanke is assistant editor of Bookseller+Publisher

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker