An informative, empathetic guide to making painful choices.
Lee’s primer coaches people with serious ailments (and their families) to be their own medical advocates.
The author, a palliative care physician, addresses patients with severe health problems, advising them on dealing with doctors who may not always be forthcoming with information or cognizant of a patient’s individual needs, urging them to take the lead in making decisions and plans about their health care. She gives readers advice on determining treatment goals, including extending life and staying active versus alleviating suffering; talking about care and end-of-life issues with family members; setting up advanced directives and medical power of attorney; and handling symptoms like the constipation caused by opioid pain relievers (try laxatives) or debilitating fatigue (plan tasks with intermittent breaks). Lee also weighs in on the pros and cons of cardiopulmonary resuscitation when life may no longer be worth enduring the bruising measures necessary to preserve it for a little while longer; coping with burnout among caregivers; and crafting a deathbed legacy, such as a scrapbook or a recorded testament. The book is laid out in lucid, easy-to-read chapters and bullet-pointed sections and presents wide-ranging discussions of every aspect of illness, from the most basic—how debilitated patients “find the bathroom and pull up and down pants and wipe appropriately”—to more philosophical issues, such as how we define a good life. An appendix includes scripted questions for patients and families to ask doctors, covering both nuts-and-bolts questions (“Who can help me obtain handicap accessible modifications?”) and devastating conundrums (“My family cannot agree on what to do next with my loved one. Who can help us?”). Lee’s prose is straightforward, concrete, and easily accessible to laypeople, and she writes with sensitivity about emotional trauma, drawing on her own experiences with the gravely ill (“Without dialysis, she wouldn’t suffer anymore,” agonizes a husband contemplating ending treatment for his pain-ridden wife. “It’s just…we’ve been together fifty-four years, and she’s the love of my life”). Readers will find this a useful, reassuring resource when confronting a sometimes-baffling and intimidating medical establishment.
An informative, empathetic guide to making painful choices.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9798987389300
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Real Palliative Care
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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