A limited but valuable resource for new and experienced doctors interested in the business side of medicine.
A senior ophthalmologist with an EMBA from Georgia State University advises young doctors on the business of medicine.
In this slim, to-the-point volume, Harbin (Waking up Blind, 2009) seeks to fill in the yawning gaps in medical education. Doctors starting out may be well-trained in medicine, he asserts, but typically they’re woefully unprepared for the challenging, unavoidable business aspects of the profession. By his own account, Harbin goes for the big picture and leaves the details for his target audience to work out for themselves. He provides a solid framework for the kinds of choices and business-minded decisions doctors will face not only early in their careers but later on as well. Knowledge of these business aspects, he argues, makes for better, more personally fulfilled doctors, which benefits their patients, too. “This material is just as important as medical knowledge and should be taught at some point during medical training,” Harbin says. Advice includes how to perform due diligence in choosing the right type of practice, how to spot red flags and negotiate contracts, and reasons to check with the spouse before committing to a particular practice or geographic location. Following that are forays into insurance, office efficiency, personal and business finance, and how to deal with troublemaking doctors in a group practice. Also included is counsel on matters such as how to run a good meeting; the key, he says, is a firm time limit. Though well-organized, easy to read and rich in sage advice, the book suffers from a few gaps. A brief mention of the Internet fails to capture the immense changes in the doctor-patient relationship now that medical information can be accessed online; similarly, the relationship between doctors and drug makers gets a light once-over. Medicare, Medicaid and the uninsured go unexplored, and there appears to be little information about the impact of Obamacare, even though it will most certainly alter the industry. Notably, the chapter on ethics doesn’t fill two pages.
A limited but valuable resource for new and experienced doctors interested in the business side of medicine.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938223679
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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