An eye-opening work about health care workers’ sacrifices and burdens.
A book that offers insights into life on the front lines during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
At first glance, Delaney doesn’t seem like the obvious person to write a book that compares the work of health care workers to that of soldiers. He was a National Basketball Association referee for 25 years, but his prior experience as an undercover police officer is where he learned about the impact of PTSD firsthand. In these pages, Delaney reveals the challenges and trauma faced by doctors, nurses, patients, and loved ones during the first stages of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Andrejs E. Avots-Avotins, vice president of medical affairs for Baylor Scott & White Health in Texas, notes that the Covid-19 crisis in Dallas reminded him of the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Nurse Emily Grace recalls how refrigerated trailers were put in her unnamed New York City hospital’s parking lot to accommodate patients’ dead bodies in March 2020; she also discusses how she strove to protect her family members, including effectively isolating herself from them for two months. Nurse Leah Churchill describes her choice to enter the danger zone in New York after seeing the desperation of health care workers on the news from her home in Florida. Over the course of the book, Delaney effectively highlights the roles shame, guilt, and negativity played in health care workers’ lives and the importance of conversations among peers to help deal with trauma. His own personal history with PTSD, and his willingness to speak about it openly, will likely encourage others in similar situations to work toward healing. However, the author relies mostly on his own personal experience as a reference in his analysis of PTSD in medical workers; expertise and data from experts in the field would have given the self-help aspects of this work more weight.
An eye-opening work about health care workers’ sacrifices and burdens.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947951-54-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: City Point Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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