A book for health care professionals packed with information to improve the embattled industry.
Weinstein and Readinger take a look at problems facing healthcare professionals and suggest ways to fix them.
The authors make it clear from the first line of the introduction that American health care, as it stands right now, is a problem. “We talk a lot about the pandemic and the impact of its aftermath on our healthcare system,” they write. “But our system, although revered as one of the best in the world, has been broken for much longer than three years.” What follows is a blueprint to fix this system, developed using a protocol called Diagnostic Thinking that included one-on-one and group interviews with nurses who pinpointed issues in the health care industry. Those interviews led to the three sections of the book: “Workforce,” addressing problems finding qualified nurses; “Well-Being,” a discussion about taking care of nurses in the workplace; and “Wisdom,” which outlines ideas for accomplishing these goals. Chapters in these sections include topics such as “Creating a Culture of Emotional Safety in Healthcare,” “Inspiring Gen Z to Stay,” “Frontline Nurses…Experiencing Well-Being,” and “Unleashing the Power of Nurses.” The final chapter, “From Ideation to Reality,” is written by Weinstein, a nurse, and includes bulleted ideas (give nurses a voice; promote nurse health; identify needs and solve one problem at a time) that could serve as a call to action for health care leaders. This book isn’t for a general audience—it’s specifically geared toward nurses and other health care professionals and is chock-full of supporting evidence regarding the problems that need to be tackled within the nursing workforce. The text is well-organized and the methodology is spelled out in full, but this is much more an expanded research paper (including 20 pages of endnotes) than it is a highly readable look at the health care industry. But that isn’t what the authors were after—they want to shine a light on some serious problems, and this book certainly does that. It also serves up some answers and suggestions for a way forward to a healthier health care system.
A book for health care professionals packed with information to improve the embattled industry.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781637559666
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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