An eye-opening work about health care workers’ sacrifices and burdens.
A book that offers insights into life on the front lines during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
At first glance, Delaney doesn’t seem like the obvious person to write a book that compares the work of health care workers to that of soldiers. He was a National Basketball Association referee for 25 years, but his prior experience as an undercover police officer is where he learned about the impact of PTSD firsthand. In these pages, Delaney reveals the challenges and trauma faced by doctors, nurses, patients, and loved ones during the first stages of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Andrejs E. Avots-Avotins, vice president of medical affairs for Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas, notes that the Covid-19 crisis in Dallas reminded him of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Nurse Emily Grace recalls how refrigerated trailers were put in her unnamed New York City hospital’s parking lot to accommodate patients’ dead bodies in March 2020; she also discusses how she strove to protect her family members, including effectively isolating herself from them for two months. Nurse Leah Churchill describes her choice to enter the danger zone in New York after seeing the desperation of health care workers on the news from her home in Florida. Over the course of the book, Delaney effectively highlights the roles shame, guilt, and negativity played in health care workers’ lives and the importance of conversations among peers to help deal with trauma. His own personal history with PTSD, and his willingness to speak about it openly, will likely encourage others in similar situations to work toward healing. However, the author relies mostly on his own personal experience as a reference in his analysis of PTSD in medical workers; expertise and data from experts in the field would have given the self-help aspects of this work more weight.
An eye-opening work about health care workers’ sacrifices and burdens.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947951-54-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: City Point Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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