A clear, impassioned plea for better care and a convincing plan to secure it.
Sorensen makes a proposal for a smarter diagnostic tool to ease the daily burden on physicians and other health care workers and strengthen patient care.
The author’s case for the patented HIPUS® system posits that burnout, uneven care, and rising costs in the American health care system all share a common root: outdated IT that buries doctors in data entry instead of supporting patient attention and care. Drawing on his experience in emergency medicine, Sorensen, a doctor, outlines how HIPUS® combines color-coding with Bayesian logic to make complex diagnostic reasoning clearer and faster. His emergency room anecdotes illustrate how bloated records, blurred doctor/nurse roles, and profit-driven oversight push physicians toward “moral injury” and cause avoidable errors. The proposed benefits of HIPUS® are numerous, chief among them the ways that simple color-coded cues can turn abstract concepts like diagnostic test sensitivity and specificity into clear, navigable visual signals doctors can grasp at a glance, helping them to weigh test results and symptoms quickly without doing extra math. Per the author, these tools do not aim to replace physicians’ judgment but rather to support it more effectively, improving workflows and strengthening patient care. The author acknowledges his pitch’s biggest obstacle from the start: The same physicians it seeks to help are often the ones most likely to resist new tools, especially when it comes to IT. The book’s greatest strength lies in how it blends Sorensen’s first-hand ER stories with practical, hypothetical examples that show the HIPUS® tool in action. The writing can be dry at times, and much of it isn’t really for lay readers, but the text stays tightly focused without drowning the reader in jargon. While the potential and promise of the tool outpace the proof offered here, the root problems it tackles are real and backed by clear facts and figures. Change is needed, and the text makes a persuasive case for this particular fix.
A clear, impassioned plea for better care and a convincing plan to secure it.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882812
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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