An insightful perspective on the realities of crucial health care providers.
An intimate look at the lives of nurses.
Journalist Robbins (The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School, 2011, etc.) has made a career digging into the secrets of sorority sisters, geeks, overachieving children, and the exclusive Ivy League club known as Skull and Bones. Here, she investigates nursing, offering a detailed, sympathetic, and eye-opening portrait of how nurses work, deal with stresses, and fulfill their mission of serving patients. Drawing from hundreds of interviews and undercover hospital observations, Robbins focuses on four ER nurses who represent a cross section of the profession: Sam, just starting her career at a teaching hospital that happens to be “a destination of choice” for the homeless and drug addicts; the more experienced Molly, who works at a suburban hospital just bought by a corporation with its eye on the bottom line; her colleague Juliette, shunned by a clique of nurses; and Lara, working at an overwhelmed inner-city hospital, who succumbs to the temptation of easy access to narcotics. Caring for patients is stressful in itself, but the nurses’ jobs, Robbins notes, are made more difficult by many abuses: doctors who intimidate nurses into keeping silent when they witness physicians’ mistakes; bullying by other nurses, more prevalent than bullying from doctors; verbal—and sometimes physical—abuse by patients or their families; lack of support or understanding for nurses’ distress when a patient dies; and severe overwork. “For twelve to fourteen hours at a time,” the author writes, “they must demonstrate physical and emotional stamina, alert intelligence, and mental composure” no matter what the circumstances. Cuts in nursing staff have led to impossible patient loads and long hours with no time to eat or briefly rest. Robbins ends the book with a chapter on advice for hospitals, the public, and aspiring and experienced nurses, with suggestions for ameliorating some problems.
An insightful perspective on the realities of crucial health care providers.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7611-7171-3
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Workman
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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