A practical primer on how to safeguard your right to make your own decisions about medical care. With the assistance of health-writer Nimmons, Dubler, a Harvard-trained lawyer and clinical ethicist at N.Y.C.'s Montefiore Medical Center, shares her knowledge of how hospitals operate and what powerful forces influence health-care decisions today. To avoid dependency on ``the uncertain kindness of strangers,'' she recommends that patients use the procedure developed by her ``ethics SWAT team'' to help resolve issues: first, clarify the medical facts; next, find out the possible options and their consequences; then, understand how the options fit one's own personal values. Ideally, decisions are made by the patient, but, as Dubler stresses, in the real world of modern medicine this is often not the case. In fact, life-and-death decisions may be made by concerned but uncertain and confused family members, by professional caregivers whose priorities are not the same as those of the patient, or even by courts and bureaucrats. The issues in many of the case studies Dubler describes are familiar—the right to refuse care, the right to die, the rights of parents over the care of their children, the right of access to scarce resources, such as organs for transplant or beds in an ICU—but Dubler presents them with a rare clarity. A staunch advocate of planning, she offers suggestions on how to gather needed information, how to examine your values with the help of a value-history form, how to document wishes in a living will and a videotape, and how to designate a proxy decision-maker. A superb guidebook to issues most of us would rather not think about—but should.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-517-58399-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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
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
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