An honest, compassionate look at what it takes to care for some of America’s most vulnerable citizens.
A veteran nurse practitioner reflects on her time working in a clinic for elderly, low-income patients in this debut memoir.
In the 1980s, Crane left her job as a nurse with the VA to take charge of a new senior clinic in a high-rise public housing complex on Chicago’s West Side, an experience she chronicles in her vivid, unflinching book. She was eager for the chance to prove her mettle and relished the opportunity to run her own clinic independently. But from her first day on the job, it was clear she might be in over her head. Her Evan-Picone suits were out of place in the makeshift, roach-infested clinic, where the single bathroom doubled as a conference room. Gangs and violence were a problem in the surrounding neighborhood. But the real challenge was getting used to her co-workers and patients. Though her instinct was to stick to giving checkups and dispensing medical advice, the author soon found herself planning funerals for people who had no family, defending the elderly against scammers, and visiting local bars to track down one woman’s alcoholic son. In this thoughtful and compelling memoir, Crane’s keen eye for detail brings her stories, by turns heartbreaking and humorous, to life on the page. Graphic accounts of treatments, like an at-home pelvic exam she performed on a seriously ill woman, are disturbing but reflect the reality of caring for a disadvantaged population with few resources. The author also has a clear sense of her own weaknesses. She admits she sometimes had a “mental block against taking action,” which seemed partly born of wanting to help patients retain their dignity and independence but also a desire to keep her emotional distance in complicated situations. In one case, she admits to feeling a sense of relief when a patient died, since it meant she would no longer have to dedicate so much effort to arranging her care. Through it all, Crane’s passion for helping others is obvious even as she struggles to figure out the best way to do that.
An honest, compassionate look at what it takes to care for some of America’s most vulnerable citizens.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-445-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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