An expert bottoms-up examination of our diseased health care system.
A fierce denunciation of American medicine in which physicians are the heroes—mostly.
Doctors Dean and Talbot, founders of a nonprofit called The Moral Injury of Healthcare, explain that “moral injury” occurs when we experience something that transgresses our beliefs. For doctors, that means the oath to put patients’ needs first. It’s no secret that doctors must now comply with powerful stakeholders in the system, including insurers, hospital administrators, and oppressive regulators, as well as lugubrious electronic medical records. Stories of health care workers suffering “burnout” fill the media, but most blame overwork aggravated by the pandemic. Not so, maintain the authors. The culprit is moral injury, the result of applying aggressive, modern business methods to medical practice. In the introduction, the authors describe a dynamic entrepreneur whose massive hospital earned huge profits by minimizing staff and maximizing testing and services whether necessary or not, and perhaps breaking the law. Finally sent away with a golden parachute, he was replaced by another entrepreneur who promised “significant value for our shareholders.” As the authors demonstrate consistently, hospital executives see themselves as responsible to stockholders, not to physicians or patients. This includes many nonprofits, whose administrators give profits priority and benefit from them. Dean and Talbot profile the work of physicians forced to endure moral injury who then try, sometimes successfully, to find a practice more to their liking. In the final chapter, they deliver a passionate plea for more sensible and better enforced government regulation and more generous reimbursement from public and private insurance. Neither seems on the horizon. Sadly, heartless, assembly-line health care is more profitable than the good kind and, despite lurid stories, only slightly less effective. Doctors and patients hate it, but in a nation that worships the free market, profit is evidence of a well-run institution. Pair this powerful book with an equally painful yet important view from the top: Brian Alexander’s The Hospital.
An expert bottoms-up examination of our diseased health care system.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781586423544
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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