Before I bought "Exploring Medical Language" I knew absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing about Medical Terminology.
And to tell you the truth, when I first opened this huge, intimidating, monster of a book, It scared... me... I mean, wouldn't "rhabdomyosarcoma" or "esophagogastroduodenoscopy"
frighten you (just a bit) I thought, nooooo way.

But I opened it, read it, did the cool excersises, listen the the audio tapes, played a bit with the CD-R.

She begins at the beginning.....Little baby steps.

All of a sudden... I was like, I get it! I really get it!
Not only that, but I was beginning to enjoy it.

The prefix, suffix, and word roots suddenely become beautiful, flowing words that make sense.
Myrna LaFleur Brooks made this book come alive, interesting, and allowed medical language to become a little bit like music.
Well, a little!!!! Thanx for the "A" Myrna!

I'm currently using this book as a supplemental text for my paramedic training. We've just finished cardiology, and I couldn't have done it without this text. I already owned Phalen, Dubin, and Huff; all are good, but the Huszar text is now the one I go to first when I have a question about ECG's. There are a multitude of practical illustrations, tables, and review questions. Best of all is the 200-and-some strips for practice in the appendix. Highly recommend!!

The other reviewers are right about this book's readability.

But I would also like to alert readers who love their books in short, encapsulated chapters to this book as well.

Each transcribed letter ties into others, but the characters are painted memorably enough to allow lapses of days between readings.

A great book for vacation or business travel.

This is an incredibly interesting series of letters written by an ex-professor of Russian who, through a series of misfortunes, finds himself forced to live in a ghetto in Riverside, CA, along with an incredible parade of oddballs and freaks too unbelievable to have been made up. This book is both serious and hilarious. I couldn't put it down! When I finished I passed it along to my wife and friends, all of whom reported that, they too, could not put it down.

It is a true story of a Princeton scholar who moved to California and soon lost all he had - his professorship, his family, his career - as told through transcriptions of letters sent to friends on audio cassette. Kern's style is masterful, verging on magical: I cannot otherwise explain why this book is so captivating. There is no plot, since it is a series of letters, and being a dean in an institution of higher education, I can certainly identify with the vagaries of the Academy and it's disregard for the individual, as visited on Mr. Kern. Yet none of this explains how or why this book gets under the skin. My only conclusion is that through an intelligent yet accessible style, Kern presents himself as a modern day Everyman and the story of his life is a morality play of the nineties. In this story he encounters a series of strange individuals (too bizarre to have been made up!), searches for work, searches for love, and ultimately, finds the woman who takes him away from the human swamp known as Dwight street, from which his letters are sent. One can only hope that, if visited with similar circumstances, one would respond as rationally, and ultimately publish a book about it! I am giving copies of this book to intelligent and insightful friends who I know will appreciate it.

- Dan Angelo

In reading this remarkable book, one should not forget that it is a widow's memoir, not an historical work. Anna Larina was but a child when she fell in love with the charismatic Nikolai Bukharin, one of the inner circle of Bolshevik intellectuals who seized control of Russia during the October Revolution in 1917. When they married, she was a beautiful Russian girl barely out of her teens and Bukharin was a celebrated national figure of 43. They had a very short married life together before Bukharin was swept into Stalin's counter-revolutionary net with trumped-up charges that he was plotting an anti-Bolshevik takeover including a plan to assassinate Stalin himself. This culminated in the celebrated "Moscow Show Trials" of the 1930's where Bukharin "confessed" his guilt and was executed.

All this is written about from the horrified wife's perspective and it makes an absorbing narrative, indeed. It was not enough for the Stalinist Communists of that era to imprison the accused. They imprisoned the family of the accused as well. Being the wife of a counter-revolutionist was a crime in Communist Russia. And so -- off to imprisonment or exile. That Anna's and Bukharin's son was only a year old at the time, made no difference to the proletarian authority. The child was taken from the mother's arms and finally was raised in foster homes. It took 20 years before mother and son were reunited. The scene describing the reunion of the mother with her lost son is one of the many high points of her book. Anna's vivid descriptions of her life in squalid, filthy prisons she was sent to over the years is reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's work. Yet, somehow she did not fully convey the intense moral outrage of such an unjust treatment. Perhaps, that is because she had to learn to suppress those feelings to keep alive, to hang on to sanity.

In her view, it was not Bolshevism but Stalin who was the villain. He is everyone's villain in post-communist Russia. Anna Larina makes no effort to soften her feelings for the dictator who once had been a friend of Bukharin's but who finally did him in.

She argues Bukharin's innocence not as a lawyer would but with all the emotion of a wife whose husband, son and youth were stolen unjustly from her by one of the Century's most vicious despots.

I highly recommend this book to be read after obtaining a more historical perspective in Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution : A Political Biography, 1888-1938 by Stephen F. Cohen who, incidentally, penned the introduction to Anna Larina's most interesting and memorable book.

This is one of the most haunting books I have ever read. Larina provides a window into one of the most disturbing periods of modern history. The reader will find himself (or herself) drawn into the madness that was Stalin's system of terror of the 1930's. The author's survival of the purges, and her determined faith in her doomed husband, are a testimony to the spirit of the Russian people.