A homey, candid, touching, empathic, and invaluable resource for those dealing with the specifics of a loved one’s last days.
A layperson’s guide to the end of life.
Windham, a nurse who specializes in end-of-life care, provides a truly important, useful guide to the process of dying. It’s highly accessible yet also detailed and comprehensive: “Families do not know and cannot be expected to know all about hospice,” the author explains, and she attempts to fill that knowledge gap for the average family. On its face, this work is about hospice care as an institution, and it thoroughly covers issues from that angle, including how to choose such care and how to pay for it. However, the author also delves into a range of other subjects. On one end of the spectrum, she discusses emotional, family, and psychological issues related to death, including coping with grief, handling estrangement among family members, and understanding the role of intimacy. At the other end, she tackles such practical but confusing topics as legal paperwork and pain medications. The book’s listing of pharmaceutical treatments for such ailments as coughs, diarrhea, and even hiccups is one example of how this clear, easy guide will be a real help to caregivers. The author urges families to seek out hospice assistance in order to improve the quality of life in a patient’s final weeks: “Almost three-fourths of all terminally ill people die in hospitals alone and afraid,” she notes, “unable to spend their remaining weeks and days in closeness with their spouse.” Hospice, the author asserts, provides an alternative that decreases patient pain and anxiety and assists family members in beginning to grieve. Readers will also find that the author has a very spiritual view of her calling, but it never feels forced—it’s simply part of her own story. Overall, Windham’s approach to care is holistic and hands-on.
A homey, candid, touching, empathic, and invaluable resource for those dealing with the specifics of a loved one’s last days.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1859-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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