Vivid dispatches from the “often battlefield-like conditions” of an inner city labor and delivery unit.
In this debut memoir, Wyler, a 30-year nursing veteran and midwife, shares her unique experiences over two years in a demanding, high-risk obstetrical department. These episodes, derived from the author’s personal journal entries, illustrate a dramatic, often unseen portrait of life inside a busy medical facility. From the opening chapters, the author demonstrates an affinity for the more challenging roles in the department, such as being a “roving” nurse or working in the labor intensive-care area, with its larger rooms, expansive windows, and “red blanket” patients whose pregnancy conditions were critically life-threatening. In a large, unnamed metropolitan hospital serving a good portion of poor, uninsured urban mothers and their children, the author worked well with ever changing shifts of co-workers, each with his or her own idiosyncratic personality, and a colorful collection of events including “screaming mothers, demanding doctors, and hair-raising deliveries.” Indeed, such complicated deliveries comprised a good portion of her work, though some cases were trickier than others. The case of a young, drug-abusing mother (also a prisoner) who developed a mysterious fever, for example, pales in comparison to heartbreaking cases of stillborn babies. Wyler also tells of the panic of an over-capacity unit and of epidurals administered by anesthesiologists with curt, unsympathetic bedside manners. But she also infuses the narrative with her own humanity, discussing her own struggles with burnout, family life, the ward’s space limitations, and scheduling snafus. However, the fact that her stories are largely restricted to the obstetrical department does limit their variety; readers who only have a mild curiosity about medicine may find themselves fully satisfied after just a few of these repetitive, if often fascinating, chapters. Still, aside from the barrage of medical jargon and graphically detailed procedures, Wyler’s autobiographical snapshots of the nursing world strike a satisfying balance between stories of her delivering safe, effective medical care and remaining compassionate while professionally and personally growing as a nurse. Readers with a personal interest in modern health care will glean the most from this true-to-life depiction. A knowledgeable, adrenaline-infused portrait of the realities of nursing, written with palpable passion.
Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-6765-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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