A beautiful homage to the dignified, unsung heroes of hospital care.
A poignant journey through the “tragedies and joys of a remarkable career” in hospital patient care.
Before becoming a successful novelist, Watson (Where Women Are Kings, 2015, etc.) spent 20 years as a nurse, and her vast experience informs this memoir. She escorts readers through the hospital wards she’s been assigned to, attests to the work-related trauma that threatened her personal spirit, and celebrates the return on her investment in a nursing career. As a teenager in Britain, Watson stumbled onto nursing courses, found her niche, and never looked back. Her first year as a nursing student proved harrowing, and she describes her attempt to save the life of a newly discovered suicide victim on the floor of his room. This event prompts commentary on frustrating governmental cuts in health care that she believes are crippling critical mental health and social service programs. Written with warmth and a sense of empathy for her patients, the memoir flows through episodes early in her nursing career when she shadowed a midwife through labor and delivery, trained in a pediatric intensive care unit, soothed a child with aggressive brain cancer, and comforted an elderly widow complaining of chest pain but whose appearance and symptoms more directly pointed to a broken heart. Watson also sorrowfully chronicles her own father’s death “in slow motion” in a cancer ward and the palliative nurse who made a lasting final impression on his life. As she notes, the author’s nursing career also had its softer, kinder edges, but her graphic descriptions of operating room procedures and the eye-watering aromas hovering over a surgical nursing unit may leave more sensitive readers lightheaded. The author’s passion for and true love of nursing are evident on every page, and this quality makes the book an absorbing read and a testament to the immense responsibility, diligent work, and compassionate spirit of medical caregivers.
A beautiful homage to the dignified, unsung heroes of hospital care.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6163-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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