A timely tribute to the modern-day heroes of medicine, conveyed in their own words.
Dispatches from the front lines of emergency nursing.
In this follow-up to the similarly structured Walk in My Combat Boots, Patterson and Eversmann present brief but meaningful first-person narratives that illustrate the true realities of nursing “at the center of it all.” Split into sections representing their clinical shifts, the contributors vary by location, gender, and care experience. The authors open with a harrowing narrative deep dive within the “horrific” first wave of Covid-19 in which four infected patients perished during one nurse’s shift. Her closing sentiments are echoed by many throughout the book: “My years in nursing have taught me resiliency.” Another common theme is the chaotic frenzy of emergency departments. One contributor calls her Detroit hospital, which plays host to a barrage of extreme situations, the “Wild West of nursing,” while another recalls a visit by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who had just begun his groundbreaking work in euthanasia. Others remember purposefully violating hospital policy to hold a patient’s hand or allow a wife to bring a dying husband’s dog to the ICU. The book is packed with gut-wrenching scenes and a kaleidoscope of emotions. In one heartbreaking scene, a terrified Covid patient, suffering from “guppy breathing,” is met by fully masked and gowned nurses, who later note how the pandemic has caused “a major shift in medical treatment. The human touch is almost gone.” There are happy outcomes, trivial clinical missteps, cantankerous patients (says one nurse, “certain patients are just dicks”), and situations so stressful and bizarre that they can’t help but elicit exasperated laughter. These readable bite-sized snippets represent a significant caregiver demographic of women and men who exhibit the labor-intensive focus, compassion, dedication, and passion necessary to be an emergency nurse. From the heartfelt to the tragic, this book displays the nursing profession in all its unsung glory.
A timely tribute to the modern-day heroes of medicine, conveyed in their own words.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5426-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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