The changing face of nursing—revealed through relatively lackluster portraits of three working nurses. To predict the present status of a field that has long struggled for true professional standing, Carpineto, a psychotherapist, has selected the pseudonymous ``Dominique,'' a young staff nurse; ``Jessie,'' an experienced nurse manager; and ``Gina,'' a high-tech clinical nurse specialist. All three are employees of the same unnamed Boston hospital, although they have little or no interaction with each other. Carpineto spent several months following the three around, observing the dynamics of their relations with patients, physicians, nurses, and other staff, and interviewing their colleagues. Although she focuses on the nurses' work lives, the author also provides details of their family backgrounds, childhoods, and personal lives in an attempt to make the women come alive. Unfortunately, what she does not do very well is get inside the characters of her subjects, who remain flat on the page. Carpineto's frequent glowing descriptions of the nurses and her inclusion of copious complimentary quotes from their colleagues (about Jessie, for example, one co-worker says: ``She's such a happy person, so thoroughly knowledgeable about oncology'') create the impression that the author is reluctant to see her subjects as less than ideal representatives of nursing. Similarly, her flattering references to the hospital leave the sense that she may have been anxious not to offend those who gave her access. Nevertheless, Carpineto does offer a picture of an occupation in crisis that gives food for thought to anyone contemplating nursing as a career. The frustrations and drudgery of the job are made evident—as are the new opportunities created by advances in health-care technology. Despite its subtitle, not a gripping story of heartache and courage, but a fitfully informative look at where nursing stands today.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07095-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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