A forthright, poignant, and heartwarming account of a storied and beloved career in nursing.
In this memoir, a veteran health care worker shares inspirational adventures from her long career.
For as long as she could remember, Prisceaux always wanted to be a nurse. In her heartfelt, anecdotal book, she recalls growing up in Yonkers in awe of nursing revolutionary Florence Nightingale and how she “wanted to be just like her.” As a teenager, her bouts with paralyzing shyness soon vanished once she pursued a nurse’s aide job at a local hospital in the Philadelphia suburb where her family had relocated. Prisceaux emerged as a determined, goal-oriented young woman aiming her sights on New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Center and School of Nursing in 1959 (costing only $200). Even falling down a flight of stairs at the Port Authority on the morning of her admission interview couldn’t derail her. She describes her school years in animated detail, recalling working as a nurse “determined to survive every curve thrown at me in this strange new world I found myself in.” A naturally engaging storyteller, Prisceaux stuffs her memoir with anecdotes, stories, opinions, and seasoned perspectives, spanning the best and worst moments of the author’s 60-year nursing career. Among the more resonant highlights are memories of the first time she sponge-bathed a smirking male patient at the age of 18 and the whirlwind months spent in the Army Nurse Corps, only to then fall madly in love, get married, and welcome her daughter Laura Mary in 1964. As a young nurse, the author agonized over the accidental deaths of patients she’d attended to in the emergency room or intensive care ward. But with experience and numerous relocations, and despite marital discord and the exhaustive mothering of three children, the author became admired and respected as a nursing “road warrior.” Prisceaux closely observed the health care industry evolve across its medical, political, and technological landscapes. She remarks with great insight and knowledge about the seemingly never-ending series of changes that continued to take place in modern medicine. Nurses in general—as well as those suffering from career burnout—will find much inspiration and encouragement in the author’s tender, droll, humorous, and immensely moving stories about the intense work regimen, the personal struggles, and the often bittersweet but fulfilling patient interactions.
A forthright, poignant, and heartwarming account of a storied and beloved career in nursing.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 978-1954676534
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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