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 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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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