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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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