A well-informed consideration of the intimacy of care.
A warm appreciation of the nursing profession.
Freelance journalist DiGregorio, author of Early, a history of premature birth, celebrates nursing in a capacious look at nurses throughout history, from prehistoric times to the present. Rather than focus only on hospital practice, the author sees nursing “as a biological science and as hands-on caring, as professional and as domestic, as skills and as relationships, as knowing in the mind and knowing in the body.” Before university-trained physicians dominated medical care, creating a hierarchy that defined nurses as their menial assistants, hands-on caring was provided by lay physicians, herbalists, midwives, members of religious communities, mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, who passed down skills and potions to heal wounds and repair vulnerable bodies. Nursing, the author asserts, did not begin in Victorian England with the tireless—though racist and classist—Florence Nightingale. DiGregorio highlights the work of some famous nurses, including Lillian Wald, who established a visiting nurse system, and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. But most of her abundant evidence of the crucial and transformative practice of nursing comes through her profiles of community health nurses, first responders, reproductive health providers, nurses-turned-politicians, and hospice nurses. As the largest portion of the workforce, 4 million registered nurses practice in the U.S., and 90% are women. Although there is no nursing shortage, hospitals often cut nursing staff to keep costs low: “Nurses are considered a hospital expense,” writes DiGregorio, “because their practice is usually not billable to insurance the way physicians’ services are.” Overworked and exhausted, many are engaging in collective action, a move the author believes should get active public support. As one nurse told her, “Nursing is a profoundly radical profession that calls society to equality and justice, to trustworthiness and to openness. The profession is, also, radically political: it imagines a world in which the conditions necessary for health are enjoyed by all people.”
A well-informed consideration of the intimacy of care.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9780063071285
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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