A revealing and stirring directive aiming to heal medicine from the inside out.
A career physician ponders the positive and negative aspects of how health care reform is transforming the delivery of care and the medical profession itself.
Nussbaum’s (The Pocket Guide to the DSM-5 Diagnostic Exam, 2013) passionate appeal for the “renewal of medicine” stems from his clinical career and psychiatry directorship at Denver Health and the many incarnations he’s embodied there as a patient, educator, student, and ethicist. Clinical professionals view health care reform as a “series of competing initiatives,” and the author cleverly equates it to sailing at sea following an unmarked course of undetermined duration rather than a “well-organized race” toward the goal of cost-efficient, effective, quality care. Nussbaum begins with memories of his time in medical school, clinical residency, and his early career as a physician, when he learned, however detachedly, “to see people as a compendium of parts and a source of income” and to step back to view modern health care through the lens of both the everyday consumer and caregiver alike. He relates wonderfully to an esteemed array of medical intellectuals such as disheartened doctor Abraham Verghese, who advocated for the integration of heart into health care. Nussbaum also relates prophetic metaphors of Canadian physician Sir William Osler and the proposals of radical health pioneer Archibald Cochrane. Nussbaum even considers noted surgeon and public health advocate Atul Gawande’s suggestion of boosting generalized health care’s productivity by using the Cheesecake Factory’s operational business model. Particularly striking is the author’s keen if underdeveloped commentary on the medical marijuana conundrum, which begs for further introspection. In sharing the many tribulations of real-life patients and physicians, Nussbaum unveils a thoughtful, well-rounded, yet thorny vision of the current state of medicine. His generous narrative offers clarity and direction on how the industry can avoid sacrificing humanity to the trappings of an industrialized, unsympathetic, automated version of health care.
A revealing and stirring directive aiming to heal medicine from the inside out.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-21140-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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