An invaluable inside look at the realities of the U.S. health care system.
An emergency room physician recalls his eventful career in this insightful, occasionally harrowing, memoir.
Despite the subtitle, debut author Bentley’s reminiscences are hardly random. They have been selected to succinctly or dramatically convey the progression of a decadeslong career. Leaving out personal details unless relevant to his anecdotes, Bentley emerges as a compassionate doctor who sympathizes with his patients, including those who have allowed their bodies to fall apart. He is also empathetic; for example, he rails against oncologists offering “the promise of ‘more life’ ” without mentioning the horrible side effects that a patient might endure from a last-resort cancer treatment. Bentley, however, acknowledges that many ER admissions and treatments reflect the pressure from health care corporations to keep their hospitals as busy as possible—whether treatment or even, in some cases, admission are justified. Sometimes, questionable admissions, like that of a patient who didn’t have any discernible blood pressure because he was dead, illustrate incompetence rather than corporate greed. But Bentley also encountered many “patients” seeking treatment for fictitious problems solely to obtain a particular painkiller or to avoid a court date or some other selfish motive, which only added to the burdens of a largely broken health care system. The horrors documented here include a lab tech discarding blood samples and returning to the magazine he was reading; the “wallet biopsies,” in which insurance policies dictate treatment; and malpractice suits filed almost automatically when ER patients die. Despite some misspellings (“beaurocratic”), the writing is effective; Bentley emerges as the doctor everyone would want in a medical emergency.
An invaluable inside look at the realities of the U.S. health care system.Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491730072
Page Count: 142
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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