A medical chronicle that effectively combines dramatic tension with the detachment of a veteran emergency flight nurse.
An experienced flight nurse provides an insider’s look at the daily workload, idiosyncrasies, and camaraderie of the crew of a helicopter air ambulance in this debut memoir.
Bell recounts that he was “married with two boys and a dog” near Phoenix, Arizona, where he was part of a three-person team working on a medical helicopter. Having started his career as an Army medic, he had hoped to become a doctor, but his plans were derailed in the 1980s by his wife-to-be’s unexpected pregnancy. Instead, he completed a program to become a registered nurse, breaking new ground in an occupation generally confined to women. His skill at emergency and intensive care eventually led him to the exciting career of flight nurse in an air ambulance. There, Bell worked with a crew of highly individualistic, matter-of-fact heroes. He trusted his life to pilots like Matt, so devoted to his wife that he never noticed other women, and Coffey, whose repertory included a constant barrage of sexist jokes. He was backed up by his paramedics, including Brian, who had custody of his 4-year-old daughter, and James, a veteran of the Army Special Forces. Together, they took on a variety of medical emergencies, from dealing with the devastating effects of an automobile collision with a semi on the interstate to finding lost hikers on a dark mountainside, bringing “Auxilium Desuper” or “aid from above” to all. Bell presents his stories in a down-to-earth voice that reflects humor and professionalism. The recitation of the crew’s medical treatments and adventures are interspersed with moments of perceptive examination of such issues as the inevitable ego clashes when elite professionals work together. The author’s plainspoken writing leads to the occasional cringeworthy simile, as when he describes his success with a difficult intubation by saying: “To my delight, there were the vocal cords staring at me like a wanting vagina.” But overall, the book is successful in its depiction of the nuts and bolts of a job unfamiliar to most and requiring both courage and skill.
A medical chronicle that effectively combines dramatic tension with the detachment of a veteran emergency flight nurse.Pub Date: May 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9995823-4-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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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