A quick, accessible introduction for new caregivers.
A compact resource that addresses the typical concerns of those who care for the elderly.
Edwards (Flip Flap Floodle, 2004) draws on 14 years of personal experience caring for her aged mother, plus additional research, to provide a survey of issues that affect people thrust into similar roles. She poses questions and discusses the factors that affect what level of care an elder needs. However, when she tackles the subject of assisted-living and skilled-nursing facilities, it highlights the inherent challenge of writing this type of book. Regulation of such facilities varies from state to state, limiting how detailed and specific such advice can be, and there’s similar variation regarding medical care, insurance, wills, probate, and other, related matters. Edwards plows many furrows, most not very deeply. Twenty-one brief chapters span the logistical, medical, financial, legal, interpersonal, social, emotional, and spiritual issues that arise when one adult becomes responsible for another. Sometimes they cover subjects in only one sentence: “Support Groups: People join support groups to share experiences and common concerns, learn coping skills, and to give each other emotional support and comfort.” As a result, this is really a book of lists with some items expounded upon a bit more fully. Edwards offers readers dozens of sources for additional reading and provides endnotes; an appendix includes charts and forms to log information regarding schedules and medications. Overall, the book is strongest when the author shares tips from her own experience providing in-home care and when discussing communication—between the caregiver and elder, with health providers, and with substitute caregivers. In these moments, she effectively shares practical methods and systems that worked for her. The prose is conversational in tone, breezy at times, but clear throughout; readers who have already used hospice care, for example, will find her descriptions spot-on. She approaches every discussion, from relationships to religion, in an inclusive, nonjudgmental manner, and her hard-earned empathy shines through.
A quick, accessible introduction for new caregivers.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940310-40-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: 4rv Nonfiction
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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