A compelling read that’s aimed at a Canadian audience but will draw in anyone with an interest in practical aspects of...
A Canadian nurse with nearly 50 years’ experience sends out an alarm call to the general public about the future of her profession.
In this slim volume, Boucher gives readers a lot to unpack. She starts by briefly covering nurses’ duties (because, as she notes, “Even most colleagues I’ve talked to admitted that they didn’t fully understand what nurses do until they began their studies”) before describing various nursing specialties. She then turns to the profession’s benefits—competitive salaries, good benefits, and making a difference in people’s lives—as well as its challenges, including stress, and the fact that nursing shortages make everyone’s job more difficult. After briefly describing the education and training required, Boucher moves on to the most urgent issue for those on the job: avoiding burnout. One of the biggest problems that nurses face, she asserts, is the managerial practice of “floating,” in which they’re “moved from the departments they normally work in to an area that lacks adequate staff.” It can be demanding, and Boucher notes some simple ways to alleviate its difficulties, such as a uniform, hospital-wide color-coding system, so that every nurse knows what shelves contain which items in every department. The book finishes with a short chapter on what laypeople can do to help, and ends by challenging readers to “work together to elevate the nursing profession and cement its future.” All too often, when an expert writes about their work, the result is so dry or mired in jargon and technical detail that outsiders find it nearly impenetrable. However, Boucher’s prose is refreshingly engaging and thoughtful throughout. Her chapter on improving job retention particularly stands out; in it, she offers real-world examples of what has worked in real-world hospitals—the color-coding, for instance, in currently use in Ottawa—and then theorizes how ideas could go further and be more helpful. It quickly becomes evident that Boucher has thought about these issues in depth and that she cares for her fellow nurses deeply.
A compelling read that’s aimed at a Canadian audience but will draw in anyone with an interest in practical aspects of healthcare.Pub Date: April 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780995191020
Page Count: 46
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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