An eloquent set of stories about the life of an emergency room doctor that alternates between the hilarious and the...
An inside look at emergency room life from one of the first emergency medicine specialists.
Plaster began his career in 1979, the first year that doctors could take a specialty certifying exam in emergency room medicine. In this debut collection of recollections about his career, he describes his realization that he had a talent for working nights and “multitasking in tense situations.” So he became “a full-time temp,” working as an emergency room doctor at a number of different hospitals while also maximizing his time with his family. He would fly in on the day of his first shift and then work up to 14 consecutive 12-hour night shifts before flying home. As he temped across the country, he confronted the gun violence endemic to inner-city emergency rooms as well as the difficulties of practicing medicine in towns that seemed to be “in the middle of nowhere.” Plaster describes encounters with drunk patients, emergency room “frequent fliers,” overprotective parents and a wide range of others. Some of his interactions are humorous, and others are heartbreaking, but they’re never dull. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, Plaster enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve at age 49. Shortly thereafter, he found himself in a sand pit somewhere on the Iraq-Kuwait border. When he returned to the United States, his military experiences gave his emergency room career a new resonance. Taken individually, Plaster’s stories are intriguing, often funny and sometimes poignantly sad. He doesn’t hesitate to reveal the impact his career has had on his personal life; for example, he writes about spending a night in an emergency room examining troubled teen and preteen girls, which filled him with worry about his own 14-year-old daughter. The only thing missing from these insightful stories is a continuous narrative. Plaster discusses his education in his introduction and places his military experience at the book’s midpoint, but he arranges his vignettes about emergency room life in seemingly arbitrary fashion. If these recollections were arranged thematically, they might have been even more affecting.
An eloquent set of stories about the life of an emergency room doctor that alternates between the hilarious and the harrowing.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1940328003
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Plaster Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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