A collection of guidelines for a more peaceful experience for dying patients and their families.
A hospice nurse delivers a guidebook on how to navigate the end-of-life journey.
The author offers sensible advice for dealing with a loved one approaching death: Listen to them, follow their wishes, believe that they understand what’s happening in their bodies, and give them permission to let go when they are ready—even if that’s an uncomfortable idea. Casoff Henry’s debut is slim and simply written, so that even someone in the midst of crisis will be able to appreciate it. She urges families to see palliative care as a reasonable choice and not a failure, which can be a difficult concept in a culture where extreme medical interventions are the norm. She advocates self-advocacy for the terminal patient—not pushing for the best treatments at any cost, but getting honest information from doctors, getting psychological support and pain control, and taking charge of one’s decisions in order to peacefully accept the end of life.Casoff Henry urges families both to resist their desire to make a patient keep going and to keep family fights out of their loved one’s space. She also suggests that families create advance directives such as living wills, health care surrogates and do-not-resuscitate orders. Secular readers will appreciate her advice’s lack of mystical or religious components. Although the book might have been more effective with more bullet points and fewer anecdotes, Casoff Henry’s practical compassion strongly comes through. She omits worksheets, sample documents or other tools which would make this guide an all-in-one planning resource, but she effectively points out simple ways to make communication and decision-making easier before death is imminent.
A collection of guidelines for a more peaceful experience for dying patients and their families.Pub Date: April 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482677409
Page Count: 134
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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