A book for health care professionals packed with information to improve the embattled industry.
Weinstein and Readinger take a look at problems facing healthcare professionals and suggest ways to fix them.
The authors make it clear from the first line of the introduction that American health care, as it stands right now, is a problem. “We talk a lot about the pandemic and the impact of its aftermath on our healthcare system,” they write. “But our system, although revered as one of the best in the world, has been broken for much longer than three years.” What follows is a blueprint to fix this system, developed using a protocol called Diagnostic Thinking that included one-on-one and group interviews with nurses who pinpointed issues in the health care industry. Those interviews led to the three sections of the book: “Workforce,” addressing problems finding qualified nurses; “Well-Being,” a discussion about taking care of nurses in the workplace; and “Wisdom,” which outlines ideas for accomplishing these goals. Chapters in these sections include topics such as “Creating a Culture of Emotional Safety in Healthcare,” “Inspiring Gen Z to Stay,” “Frontline Nurses…Experiencing Well-Being,” and “Unleashing the Power of Nurses.” The final chapter, “From Ideation to Reality,” is written by Weinstein, a nurse, and includes bulleted ideas (give nurses a voice; promote nurse health; identify needs and solve one problem at a time) that could serve as a call to action for health care leaders. This book isn’t for a general audience—it’s specifically geared toward nurses and other health care professionals and is chock-full of supporting evidence regarding the problems that need to be tackled within the nursing workforce. The text is well-organized and the methodology is spelled out in full, but this is much more an expanded research paper (including 20 pages of endnotes) than it is a highly readable look at the health care industry. But that isn’t what the authors were after—they want to shine a light on some serious problems, and this book certainly does that. It also serves up some answers and suggestions for a way forward to a healthier health care system.
A book for health care professionals packed with information to improve the embattled industry.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781637559666
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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