A comprehensive and well-written guide to managing serious medical problems.
A manual offers advice to patients dealing with the long-term effects of a medical crisis.
In this debut health book, Cohen draws on her professional experience as a rehabilitation specialist, as well as her personal experience with a series of medical errors that led to chronic difficulties, to guide readers through the process of managing the practical and emotional challenges of life-changing medical problems. Drawing on case studies, medical research, and common sense, Cohen advises readers on matters including how to adapt to the changes in lifestyle that may be required by physical limitations (“Adjustment is a much more active and empowered process than acceptance”), suggestions for alternative and complementary treatments (Cohen “entered acupuncture treatment a true skeptic but a desperate one”), and strategies for facing and working through the emotional challenges of medical problems. The book encourages readers to be active participants in their medical care, communicating with doctors (“You can articulate your needs and educate your physician about your expectations using a polite tone without an emotional meltdown”), reading all paperwork before signing, and asking for more information whenever it is necessary. The book explains the forms of rehabilitation and treatment that may be necessary (physiatry, occupational therapy, and so on) and addresses the possible paths to resolution if the medical problem is the result of practitioner error, including recommendations for ensuring mistakes are minimized in the future. Cohen’s writing is clear and engaging and manages to both avoid melodrama and acknowledge the validity of strong feelings in difficult situations. She often manages to capture the emotional core of complex stories, as in her description of watching a live-streamed Kol Nidre service while unable to leave the house and attend her local synagogue. The result is a book that is both practical and compassionate, providing guidelines for adapting to the reality of life with a serious or ongoing medical condition, giving readers practical advice for shaping their new existences while allowing for the need to mourn abilities and opportunities that are no longer available.
A comprehensive and well-written guide to managing serious medical problems.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-48762-4
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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