IN STITCHES: REVIEW AND BONUS ENTRIES

 

  GIVEAWAY ENDED
IN STITCHES

BY ANTHONY YOUN, M.D.

WITH ALAN EISENSTOCK

REMINDER ABOUT THE BOOK:

Another funny, touching memoir is coming out from Simon & Schuster called In Stitches - Dr. Anthony Youn's open and honest recount of becoming a plastic surgeon.

In Stitches is not just a book about doctors - it's really a coming-of-age story at its finest.  It's a book about not fitting in, not knowing what's coming next, and it's about Dr. Youn's own life-changing experience with plastic surgery that ultimately led him to his current career.  An accurate description would be David Sedaris meets Scrubs. 

Tony Youn grew up up one of two Asian-American kids in a small town of near wall-to-wall whiteness. Too tall and too thin, he wore thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, Hannibal Lecter headgear, and had a protruding jaw that one day began to grow, expanding Pinocchio-like, protruding to an unthinkable, monstrous size. After high school graduation, while other seniors partied at the shore or explored Europe, Youn lay strapped in an oral surgeon's chair as he broke his jaw, then reset it and wired it shut for six weeks.

Ironically, it was this brutal makeover that led him to his life's calling -- and the four years of angst, flubs, triumphs, non-stop studying and intermittent heavy drinking that eventually earned him an M.D. Thanks to a small circle of close friends and an obsessive drive to overachieve, Youn transformed from a shy, skinny, awkward nerd with no confidence and no clue into a renowned and successful plastic surgeon.

In Stitches is a heartfelt, candid, and laugh-out-loud memoir of one man's bumpy road to becoming a doctor and learning to be comfortable in his own skin.

MORE ABOUT DR. YOUN:

Tony Youn, M.D. is a board-certified plastic surgeon in private practice in Metro Detroit. He made his national TV debut on Dr. 90210 and has been a frequent guest on The Rachael Ray Show and The CBS Early Show and has appeared on The Doctors, The O'Reilly Factor, Fox and Friends, Manswers, and in specials on VH1 and E! He's written articles for RADAR magazine, MSNBC.com and CBS News.com. His comments have appeared in dozens of magazines, including US Weekly, In Touch and The National Enquirer. His blog, www.celebcosmeticsurgery.com is the most popular blog by a plastic surgeon in the country. IN STITCHES is his first book. 

IN STITCHES is now out and you can order your copy now by just going here: Amazon: http://amzn.to/institchesbook

Also, don't forget if you visit and "like" IN STITCHES on Facebook, there are ways to order there AND you can enter for a contest that has GREAT prizes including iPads, Kindles, and even more like some Botox treatments! Here is the place to go on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/institchesbook

MY THOUGHTS/REVIEW:
My first thought when I was reading IN STITCHES was about the humor in the book. I thought back to how I felt just before being wheeled into surgery to have my throat slit: I had to have half my thyroid removed due to a growth that turned out to be, thank goodness, benign. However, during those last few moments as I contemplated hopping off the gurney and running the other way, the last thing I was thinking was “Gee, I hope my surgeon is funny”! Not that all of IN STITCHES is a comedy, but rather a life journey that started out with a self-conscious, obedient Korean-American son whose father knew from Tony’s birth that he would be a doctor. Dr. Youn’s father worked hard to achieve the American dream as he came to America and succeeded in becoming a successful obstetrician, and so told tell his son at age 7, that he should become a transplant surgeon. Tony, being young, forgot about not contradicting his father and said he wasn’t sure he even wanted to be a doctor. When the smoke cleared, Tony learned never to question his father again.

The memoir tells of Tony growing up in a very conservative small city in Michigan,  and how he had to go through high school with his nerdy glasses and a huge jaw that continued to grow as he did. He had to finally have corrective plastic surgery, perhaps giving birth to a future he hadn’t even thought of as yet. The surgery was just one problem Tony had to overcome. One of his favorite topics is about his not very successful way with women, even from a young age.

That doesn’t change much in college where expectations are that he WILL have the best grades. Tony, while still obsessed with course work, is also still manic about finding a girl who will like him for who he is and as he says, will even stick around “for more than one date“. When he is talked into going out with a certain girl and things finally click for them, Tony is totally smitten. Problem is that Amy is not Korean and so he dreads taking her home to meet his parents. Again the humor kicks in as he worried for nothing as he finds out his parents are relieved he had a girlfriend because they thought he was gay all these years.  

But it is while he is in medical school that Dr. Youn finds his fascination for medicine when he becomes infatuated with a container of hands and realizes they were donated by people who cared enough about others and about medical advancements that they were willing to give up their bodies once they died so others might learn…and live. His description of medical school is all we think we know and more. Tony is so entranced with a woman’s sixth toe that he almost forgets his reason for being there is to deliver her baby. His stories of nightmarish professors and sleepless nights with nine hour shifts and no breaks, made the former school teacher in me feel better as I thought 6 hours without a bathroom break was tough!

In med school, Dr. Youn not only finds love but also his true calling in plastic surgery. Dr. Youn treated a young child who had his face mangled and nearly bitten totally off by a wild animal. Working with that child instilled in Youn that he not only wanted to be a doctor but rather one who could help those with distorted features that he could heal. His superior abilities both academically and clinically, along with his really taking an interest in his patients, all are what have made him the successful doctor he is today.

IN STITCHES is an uncomplicated, quick read and quite amusing. I have always been fascinated with medical mysteries and shows and so with the addition of the humor, and Dr. Youn’s and Alan Eisenstock’s fine writing skills, this is a book I would recommend. I certainly thought I knew how hard it was to become a doctor but laughing my way through IN STITCHES, just reinforced that in a fun and easy way.   

GIVEAWAY

THANKS TO MARNI AT SNEAK ATTACK MEDIA,

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