review: The Nurses

The Nurses: A Year of Secrets, Drama, and Miracles with the Heroes of the Hospital, by Alexandra Robbins (2015)

(I've been reading various nonfiction books about nursing, to compare to my own limited experience [I'm a former med/surg nurse who practiced mostly in the 2000s] and as background for some fiction I'm working on. This was a book written by a non-nurse, a journalist who's done several similar case-study pieces in other fields.)

My feelings about this one are very mixed. Overall I think it's an interesting and informative(*) book, and the writer's heart is definitely in the right place; Robbins clearly loves nurses and wants to raise public awareness of their work and the pressures they're under, and takes a strong stand for better working conditions and labor solidarity, while also acknowledging the many ways nurses can sabotage themselves. A particularly nice touch is near the end, where she gives patients and their family members some pretty reasonable tips on how to simultaneously advocate for their own care and make nurses' lives easier.

It was really hard for me to get past how it's written, though. ( Read more... )

Nitbar update

I've started putting up annotations for the works of John Sladek. Roderick is reasonably complete (not including some stuff that I just refuse to spend any more time figuring out— I didn't really realize till I got into it just how messy that book is, and how hard it is to find the context for some of Sladek's whimsies); I've just gotten started on Tik-Tok, which won't be nearly as dense.