An empathetic and absorbing narrative as riveting as a TV drama.
A registered nurse recounts a typical shift.
Brown (Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between, 2010), who contributes a column to the New York Times opinion page, delivers a vivid depiction of a clinical nurse's standard 12-hour shift on a hospital cancer ward. While some of her colleagues take a dispassionate, "just the facts, ma'am" approach to their work, the author takes great care in describing this particular shift. She shows superhuman forbearance of her patients' quirks and the immense demands on her limited time, and she explains that the constant requests by patients are usually defense mechanisms to combat their vulnerability and lack of control over their particular maladies. Throughout the book, Brown doesn’t provide wasted or unnecessary details. She is thorough, yet her prose moves swiftly, often reflecting the rapid pace of her shift. She effectively conveys the great burden—and uncertainty—of the critical decision-making doctors require of her and how she sometimes, agonizingly, second-guesses herself. Readers will share Brown's frustration when she laments how constant "CYA [cover-your-ass] charting" (the procedural entering of all the minutiae of patients' developments every time they are seen) takes nurses away from talking, and listening, to their critically ill patients. "Patient care…is heart and soul,” writes the author, “but these days, charting pulls nurses away from the bedside more and more….I do understand why such thoroughness matters legally, but I sometimes wonder if sadists designed our [computer charting] software. It should not be easier to order a sweatshirt from Lands End than to chart on my patients, but it is.” Throughout this engrossing book, Brown demonstrates that while nurses can appear even-tempered and certain in their decisions, they are usually harried and always working feverishly.
An empathetic and absorbing narrative as riveting as a TV drama.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61620-320-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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