by Molly Case ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
A finely wrought delineation of the art of nursing.
A journey through the variegated days and nights of a young nurse.
Combining a near dreaminess with quotidian details, both refreshingly and intimately shared (“as a last resort, we use medication to subdue patients: haloperidol, which between ourselves we call vitamin H”), London-based Case tells the story of her first steps as a nurse. She begins by discussing “last offices,” the procedures undertaken after the death of a patient. The author writes with a refreshing matter-of-factness that keeps things from becoming too opaque. She frames the narrative around the nursing checklist when first examining a patient: airway, breathing, circulation, disability, exposure. She covers each of these steps in a number of short chapters that range among compact profiles of her patients, family tales (her father was in and out of the hospital), and nursing lore and wisdom. Though Case’s writing is unaffected, that doesn’t mean it isn’t moving. When a man died alone in her ward, she writes, “I watched as the patient seemed to disappear.” Her simple explanations make for clear understanding of, for example, why a patient might try to pull out a chest drain and IV lines after an operation. Some of the most pungent passages come from what she has learned from her time on the ward. “I had become fluent,” she writes, “in the way blood moved, smelt, how its colour could signal a patient’s chances of survival.” The action takes place at an English hospital, where Case easily swings into teaching mode. We get a smattering of Galen, Aristotle, the Tzeltal Mayans, and others on their approaches to medicine, and as the author chronicles how to analyze a pulse, she reminds us that the word comes from “pulsus,” Latin for “to beat.” Each chapter is a filigree, tenderly rendered no matter what the subject.
A finely wrought delineation of the art of nursing.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00346-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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