A surprisingly vibrant and rewarding volume spotlighting the true nature and largely unacknowledged heart of a pharmacist.
A veteran pharmacist and international speaker chronicles his 33-year career through the tribulations of his customers.
Sharing stories that have “stumbled around my head and heart, some for years,” Wright (It’s Good to See You Again, 2016) offers brief anecdotes of varying degrees of poignancy, cheer, friendliness, panic, and goodwill from the retail pharmacy where he worked. He begins his book with an admission that, initially, his duties revolved more around the multitiered aspects of clinical knowledge, regulations, and safety measures than on social interaction. With the accumulation of customer encounters, he notes, came a different perspective and a “deeper awareness” of the patient experience from the dispensary side of the business. “Like a good novel,” he writes appreciatively, “all the elements of drama are there: life, death, laughter, love, and dynamic characters.” His anecdotes, most barely over a page in length, are potent, affecting, introspective, and infinitely relatable; readers will recognize some aspect of themselves in many of these vignettes. Spanning periods as far back as 1975, when Wright was just out of the University of Kansas School of Pharmacy, he remembers the first time witnessing a customer taking pills he’d just dispensed in his presence. Other accounts feature late-night phone calls and unexpected visits from worried customers looking for unbiased assurance and advice, colicky babies, asthma sufferers, and Plan B seekers. The book’s brevity is least appreciated after Wright divulges a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2006 when he began existing on both sides of the pharmacy counter and his “faith in medicine got a test.” But the minimal details may leave readers wanting to know more about the author. Adding to the allure of this collection are the many pearls of pharmacy wisdom closing several stories. Wright taps into the wellspring of reflective episodes and experiences that informed his rich career and, though he recognizes that pharmacy work is demanding, he writes that it also can be greatly fulfilling, life-affirming, and heartwarming. Within these eloquently presented memories, the author reveals the essence of his livelihood: to compassionately and professionally tap into the vital connection between “a very trusting public and very potent chemica1s.”
A surprisingly vibrant and rewarding volume spotlighting the true nature and largely unacknowledged heart of a pharmacist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-578-02876-7
Page Count: 93
Publisher: Summit Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
