Ambitious, unwieldy and unfocused.
A portrait of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., that, like the hospital’s own emergency room, is overflowing and overextended.
Salamon (Rambam’s Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It Is Necessary to Give, 2003, etc.) was permitted to roam Maimonides from waiting room to executive office in 2005 and 2006. Armed with a tape recorder and notebook, she talked to the chairman of the board, doctors, nurses, social workers, patients and members of the community involved in the hospital’s affairs. Woven into her wide-ranging account of the financial, ethical, scientific and sociological factors that shape a big metropolitan hospital’s operations are dozens of revealing profiles (most notably of president and CEO Pam Brier); her front-of-the-book cast of characters lists nearly 70 names. Salamon calls Maimonides “a petri dish of the post 9/11 world,” an apt description for a hospital founded to serve a community of Orthodox Jews in a neighborhood rapidly filling with immigrants from all over the world. Cultural conflicts are ever-present, as are those caused by human ego and ambition. The author recounts racial and religious prejudices that affect patient care, personality clashes and turf wars between doctors. Patients come and go, live or die, and fights with insurance companies are won or lost. Adding color but cluttering up her canvas are myriad irrelevant details from the administrative and professional staff’s lives and social and professional relationships. Readers learn not only who said what to whom at a staff meeting, but who wore what to whose funeral. Excerpts from the author’s daily log also pad this meandering account. However, some frank and chatty e-mails from a new emergency-room resident, a Midwesterner trying to adjust to the big-city life and work in a huge urban hospital, provide a welcome additional perspective.
Ambitious, unwieldy and unfocused.Pub Date: May 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-171-4
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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