User-oriented and pertinent; highly valuable to anyone looking to learn more about long-term care.
An authoritative, comprehensive guide to long-term care options.
About 20 years ago, when her mother had a stroke, Chercowas thrust into the role of caregiver and forced to learn about hospitals, rehabilitation, home care and hospice. That experience spawned an interest that led to a master’s degree in gerontology and a career in elder care. It also inspired her to create a website and write this book, which is essentially the print version of the site. Cherco has succeeded admirably in accomplishing her goal: to create a guidebook educating the consumer about the long-term-care marketplace. She begins with a clear, concise chapter on the fundamentals of the health care system. Next are several chapters that describe in detail the various long-term-care options, including home care, assisted living communities, nursing homes, continuing-care retirement communities and “supplemental services,” such as adult day care, hospice care and palliative care. Cherco adheres to a parallel structure, so it is particularly easy to compare the options. Every chapter except the final one begins with a real-life story about an individual or couple, followed by descriptions of the physical space, amenities, personal care services provided, a profile of who should consider this option and typical costs. The author then covers the contract, payment options, how to evaluate facilities and best practices for that type of facility. At the end of each chapter, Cherco includes detailed checklists with instructions, which allow users to compare attributes such as location, buildings, amenities, services, staffing and costs for up to three facilities. The checklists alone should prove extraordinarily valuable to consumers who want to objectively evaluate and compare long-term-care options. The text also includes a helpful glossary of terms and a selection of third-party resources. Cherco has done a masterful job of compiling indispensable details in a guide that is easy to read and understand. Caregivers and elder consumers alike should be able to use this guide as a dependable source of information.
User-oriented and pertinent; highly valuable to anyone looking to learn more about long-term care.Pub Date: April 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495428531
Page Count: 114
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2014
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
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