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WHITE HOT LIGHT

Name: WHITE HOT LIGHT
Author: Frank Huyler
ISBN: 978-0-06-293733-9

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN EMERGENCY MEDICINE

by Frank Huyler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 2020

The title aptly describes the illumination Huyler brings to patient care—and to writing about it.

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Tales from the emergency room, told with no-nonsense brevity, clarity, and compassion. In this long-awaited follow-up to The Blood of Strangers (1999), Huyler returns with more interesting, largely stand-alone stories from his work in an ER in Albuquerque. The author is a much-traveled chronicler who has also published two novels as well as poetry in the Atlantic and elsewhere, and at this stage of life, he displays a certain weariness and melancholy. However, this does not deter from the urgency to do the right thing. So Huyler recounts his lecture to the heroin addict he brought back to life and the process of suturing with painstaking care the facial slash that a man inflicted on his girlfriend with a broken beer bottle. Many of the emergencies the author encounters are truly life or death, and he marvels at a variety of medical advances—e.g., the CPR machine that revived a heart attack victim or the defibrillator that shocked the heart of a man just in time for him to be rushed to surgery. He also expounds on the remarkable nature of the human body. “In the deepest sense our lives are electrical currents,” he writes. “Charged elements—sodium and potassium and countless others—flow back and forth across membranes with impossible complexity.” Huyler enriches the text with sketches of his colleagues and of some of the patients who are ER regulars as well as anecdotes from a life growing up in foreign cities with his teacher parents. Throughout, the author pleasingly describes the various settings. “The winter sun in New Mexico is breathtaking,” he writes. “Driving as it rises is dangerous here. If you let it, it will fill your windshield with white hot light, and blind you in the mirror with its power.” The title aptly describes the illumination Huyler brings to patient care—and to writing about it.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-293733-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
RIGHT OF THIRST
by Frank Huyler

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAWS OF INVISIBLE THINGS
by Frank Huyler

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BLOOD OF STRANGERS
by Frank Huyler

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GRATITUDE

by Oliver Sacks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 2015

If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...

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Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).

In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”

If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.

Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

- BOOK REVIEW
LETTERS
by Oliver Sacks ; edited by Kate Edgar

- BOOK REVIEW
EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE
by Oliver Sacks

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RIVER OF CONSCIOUSNESS
by Oliver Sacks

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RADIO'S GREATEST OF ALL TIME

by Rush Limbaugh with Kathryn Adams Limbaugh & David Limbaugh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2022

Strictly for dittoheads.

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An unabashed celebration of the late talking head.

Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) insisted that he had a direct line to God, who blessed him with brilliance unseen since the time of the Messiah. In his tribute, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis calls him “the greatest broadcaster that [sic] ever lived.” That’s an accidental anointment, given checkered beginnings. Limbaugh himself records that, after earning a failing grade for not properly outlining a speech, he dropped out of college—doubtless the cause of his scorn for higher education. This book is a constant gush of cult-of-personality praise, with tributes from Ben Carson, Mike Pence, Donald Trump, and others. One radio caller called Limbaugh “practically perfect” and a latter-day George Washington by virtue of “the magnetism and the trust and the belief of all the people.” Limbaugh insists that conservatives are all about love, though he filled the airwaves with bitter, divisive invective about the evils of liberals, as with this tidbit: “to liberals, the Bill of Rights is horrible, the Bill of Rights grants citizens freedom….The Bill of Rights limits the federal government, and that’s negative to a socialist like Obama.” Moreover, “to Democrats, America’s heartland is ‘flyover’ country. They don’t know, or like, the Americans who live there, or their values.” Worse still for a money machine like Limbaugh, who flew over that heartland in a private jet while smoking fat cigars, liberals like Obama are “trying to socialize profit so that [they] can claim it”—anathema to wealthy Republicans, who prefer to socialize risk by way of bailouts while keeping the profits for themselves. Limbaugh fans will certainly eat this up, though a segment of the Republican caucus in Congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene et al.) might want to read past Limbaugh’s repeated insistence that “peace can’t be achieved by ‘developing an understanding’ with the Russian people.”

Strictly for dittoheads.