by Theresa Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 2015
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Theresa Brown
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
PROFILES
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.