... compelling ... The stakes are often high in Wellons’ medical field, and his stories capture the grave realities of his work ... In graceful, direct prose, Wellons recounts his experiences as a son, father, surgeon, friend, and never-ending student of medicine, sharing some of the most intimate moments of both his personal and professional life. He willingly admits mistakes he has made over the years, and he confesses to concern about bringing work home with him in the form of excessive worry over his own children and the sudden accidents that could land them on an operating table. All That Moves Us is the story of a dedicated surgeon, told with honesty and humility.
... vivid ... Wellons was an English major at the University of Mississippi, where he took writing classes with the novelist Barry Hannah and the poet Ellen Douglas. It shows, both in his narrative control and in the freshness of his descriptive touches ... Wellons writes unsparingly of his chosen specialty ... Politics is a fleeting presence elsewhere in Wellons’s book ... Identifying this drive to narrate—to tell stories as a human once the doctor’s work is done—is perhaps the key insight of Wellons’s book.
... powerful and intimate ... [Wellons'] patients are the centerpieces of each chapter, and together these accounts make for an awe-inspiring look at their resilience rather than of his obvious surgical skills ... His writing is top-tier and consistently breathtaking ... Medical memoirs don’t come much better than this.
