A highly readable, surprisingly engaging volume for anyone interested in health care issues.
A collection of letters by the CEO of the nation’s largest health plan to his 180,000 employees.
Reading other people’s mail can be irresistible—or deadly dull. What will readers find compelling in nearly five years’ worth of weekly emails from someone else’s boss? Plenty, it turns out. Halvorson (Health Care Will Not Reform Itself, 2009, etc.) offers a unique view of health care from his perch atop Oakland, Calif.–based Kaiser Permanente, a $50 billion–a-year managed care organization that insures and provides care for 9 million people in the United States. Founded in the 1940s by industrialist Henry Kaiser to cover his construction and shipbuilding workers, KP today has 40 percent of California’s health insurance market and 10 percent of the entire nation’s. In recent years, KP pioneered electronic medical records, and many of the successes Halvorson celebrates in this book derive from that $4 billion investment. Other topics include reducing hospital-acquired infections; lowering mortality rates; cultivating care teams; preventive-health research studies using “big data”; and implementing logistical fixes, such as re-engineering nurses’ shift changes and outfitting mobile clinics for rural patients. These letters, said to be unedited from their original form, contain occasional whiffs of public relations polishing, but background notes often clarify context and jargon, and many include charts and graphs as well. Halvorson maintains a consistent style and distinctive voice and presents complicated health topics in clear and simple language. A few of the author’s verbal quirks become repetitive in book form—for example, he loves the word “lovely” and the phrase “a good thing.” But by writing about his grandson’s premature birth, his dying uncle’s palliative care and his own coronary-bypass surgery, Halvorson humanizes insurance executives and hospital administrators in an era when health care reformers often cast them as boogeymen. Some readers may tire of the relentless cheerleading, but the valuable information Halvorson shares make the pep rallies worthwhile.
A highly readable, surprisingly engaging volume for anyone interested in health care issues.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478113669
Page Count: 446
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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