An informative and business-savvy proposal for small-scale, attentive elder care.
Small residential care homes are good for the elderly and for the bottom lines of investors, according to this insightful business study.
Some, a real estate broker and owner of residential care homes in the Seattle area, touts the residential care home model—featuring ordinary suburban houses with six to ten residents and round-the-clock professional staffing—as a more humane approach to elder care than large, institutionalized assisted living facilities and nursing homes. When done right, she argues, residential homes have a comfortable, familylike atmosphere and a high staff-to-resident ratio that permits individualized care for residents. Employees, she notes, can make home-cooked meals to residents’ specifications, served when they want them instead of at rigidly planned meal times; help residents practice their preferred hobbies and activities instead of relegating them to once-a-week bingo games; accompany residents to medical appointments; and spend time chatting and forging meaningful relationships. The author contends that her model of high-quality care makes for happier residents who are less prone to depression; in turn, residential care homes can charge higher rents with higher profits. Some’s primer often reads like a business plan, replete with hard-headed financial reasoning. (“Two vacancies would be a $14,000 shortage every month. Could you afford to keep a place running with that much of an income drop?…That’s why I have focused on avoiding those empty beds. By keeping employees motivated and well compensated, the home succeeds as a business.”) But she also pays attention to the softer side of elder care, writing of the wrenching psychological dislocations many elderly people endure in sensitive, nuanced prose: “When I was working at an assisted-living facility and a new resident would arrive, I would greet them and try to get to know them a little bit. One of the first things they would ask me would be ‘Does this mean I am never going back to my home? Will I be dying soon?’” Some’s expertise and passion for elder care makes her pitch all the more persuasive.
An informative and business-savvy proposal for small-scale, attentive elder care.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9798990282605
Page Count: 186
Publisher: NS Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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