Burnout is common among doctors in the West‎,‎ so one might assume that a medical career in Malawi‎,‎ one of the poorest countries in the world‎,‎ would place far greater strain on the idealism that drives many doctors‎.‎ But‎,‎ as "A Heart for the Work" makes clear‎,‎ Malawian medical students learn to confront poverty creatively‎,‎ experiencing fatigue and frustration but also joy and commitment on their way to becoming physicians‎.‎ The first ethnography of medical training in the global South‎,‎ Claire L‎.‎ Wendland‎'‎s book is a moving and perceptive look at medicine in a world where the transnational movement of people and ideas creates both devastation and possibility‎.‎ Wendland‎,‎ a physician anthropologist‎,‎ conducted extensive interviews and worked in wards‎,‎ clinics‎,‎ and operating theaters alongside the student doctors whose stories she relates‎.‎ From the relative calm of Malawi‎'‎s College of Medicine to the turbulence of training at hospitals with gravely ill patients and dramatically inadequate supplies‎,‎ staff‎,‎ and technology‎,‎ Wendland‎'‎s work reveals the way these young doctors engage the contradictions of their circumstances‎,‎ shedding new light on debates about the effects of medical training‎,‎ the impact of traditional healing‎,‎ and the purposes of medicine‎.‎