Dispatches from the front lines of emergency nursing.
In this follow-up to the similarly structured Walk in My Combat Boots, Patterson and Eversmann present brief but meaningful first-person narratives that illustrate the true realities of nursing “at the center of it all.” Split into sections representing their clinical shifts, the contributors vary by location, gender, and care experience. The authors open with a harrowing narrative deep dive within the “horrific” first wave of Covid-19 in which four infected patients perished during one nurse’s shift. Her closing sentiments are echoed by many throughout the book: “My years in nursing have taught me resiliency.” Another common theme is the chaotic frenzy of emergency departments. One contributor calls her Detroit hospital, which plays host to a barrage of extreme situations, the “Wild West of nursing,” while another recalls a visit by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who had just begun his groundbreaking work in euthanasia. Others remember purposefully violating hospital policy to hold a patient’s hand or allow a wife to bring a dying husband’s dog to the ICU. The book is packed with gut-wrenching scenes and a kaleidoscope of emotions. In one heartbreaking scene, a terrified Covid patient, suffering from “guppy breathing,” is met by fully masked and gowned nurses, who later note how the pandemic has caused “a major shift in medical treatment. The human touch is almost gone.” There are happy outcomes, trivial clinical missteps, cantankerous patients (says one nurse, “certain patients are just dicks”), and situations so stressful and bizarre that they can’t help but elicit exasperated laughter. These readable bite-sized snippets represent a significant caregiver demographic of women and men who exhibit the labor-intensive focus, compassion, dedication, and passion necessary to be an emergency nurse. From the heartfelt to the tragic, this book displays the nursing profession in all its unsung glory.
A timely tribute to the modern-day heroes of medicine, conveyed in their own words.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5426-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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The tech mogul recounts the health care–related dimensions of his foundation in what amounts to a long policy paper.
“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.” Thus states the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, a Gates adviser, who hits on a critically important point: Disease is a fact of nature, but a pandemic is a political creation of a kind. Therefore, there are political as well as medical solutions that can enlist governments as well as scientists to contain outbreaks and make sure they don’t explode into global disasters. One critical element, Gates writes, is to alleviate the gap between high- and low-income countries, the latter of which suffer disproportionately from outbreaks. Another is to convince governments to ramp up production of vaccines that are “universal”—i.e., applicable to an existing range of disease agents, especially respiratory pathogens such as coronaviruses and flus—to prepare the world’s populations for the inevitable. “Doing the right thing early pays huge dividends later,” writes Gates. Even though doing the right thing is often expensive, the author urges that it’s a wise investment and one that has never been attempted—e.g., developing a “global corps” of scientists and aid workers “whose job is to wake up every day thinking about diseases that could kill huge numbers of people.” To those who object that such things are easier said than done, Gates counters that the development of the current range of Covid vaccines was improbably fast, taking a third of the time that would normally have been required. At the same time, the author examines some of the social changes that came about through the pandemic, including the “new normal” of distance working and learning—both of which, he urges, stand to be improved but need not be abandoned.
Gates offers a persuasive, 30,000-foot view of a global problem that, he insists, can be prevented given will and money.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-53448-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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