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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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