Accessible and often amusing medical anecdotes.
Drawing on over 20 years of experience in emergency medicine, debut author Sterling presents alternately humorous and sobering stories of the “controlled chaos” of a hospital emergency room.
In these wry, short essays, the author strikes an appropriate balance between serious warnings and diverting stories. In one, he tells of a nurse who was murdered in the office below his, proving that a hospital can be a risky environment; in others, though, he provides plenty of laughs. Many pieces tread a fine line between being comical and raunchy; for example, the author writes of finding a potato up a patient’s anus and of treating a four-hour erection. He uses a mix of the past and present tense to re-create the immediacy of climactic moments. Snappy conversations—such as one that he has with macho young men who assume that they’re invincible against sexually transmitted diseases—reflect his no-nonsense attitude toward patient responsibility: “It’s my job to treat, not to judge, but sometimes it’s very difficult,” Sterling admits. Too many cases, he notes, result from reckless behavior involving overeating, alcohol, drugs, or careless driving. For instance, he describes one drag-racing fatality with three inches shaved off his skull and a man who drank window-washing fluid and suffered permanent visual damage. Even the most tragic, cautionary tales can still hold a grain of hope, though. In one of the strongest anecdotes, “Extracting Life from Death,” he writes of a woman, nine months pregnant, who got into a high-speed crash while not wearing a seatbelt. She was dead on arrival at the hospital, but Sterling delivered her baby girl alive. The book proves to be as informative as it is entertaining, thanks to its reader-friendly tactics: unfamiliar terms appear in italics, connections are made between similar cases, and bullet-pointed lists detail procedures and treatment options. Taken together, they’ll provide laymen with a way through what Sterling calls the “never-ending alphabet soup of protocols.” A gripping step-by-step narration of a cricothyrotomy (which involves making an incision in the throat to create an airway) is a highlight: “Gain control of the windpipe with one hand. Let’s go. Stab incision with only the tip of the scalpel.” Two messages come through clearly in this collection: knowledge is power, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Accessible and often amusing medical anecdotes.Pub Date: July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1612548524
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Brown Books Publishing Group
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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
BOOK REVIEW
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