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Hope and kindness are perhaps the central focus of what Watson finds to be the most important functions of a nurse, "the best nurs- ing comes from the heart, and not from the head." Therefore, it should be no surprise that Watson writes of the toll nursing takes on the heart. She explains how one must build "an immunity to sorrow" yet remain connected enough to help a young heart transplant patient write a letter of thanks to the mother of the boy who died in a car crash who donated his heart. Nursing, she writes, "is a career that demands a chunk of your soul on a daily basis." Watson also lays out commonplace problems such as workplace violence, short staffing, and the high rate of on-the-job injuries. She touches on how race, class, and poverty play out in the NHS. She laments the underfunding of the mental health system and the wait- ing rooms full of patients in need of emergency care. Watson does not provide a deep analysis of these issues, but uses them to illus- trate the challenges and struggles nurses face providing care within NHS. For nurses, this book should bring a knowing nod and a deep sat- isfaction that someone has been able to tell their story with honesty, humility, and humor. For those curious about nursing or contem- plating nursing as a profession, Watson has written an invaluable book describing the heartaches and deep rewards of entering this demanding field. —Rachel Berger Loaded: A disarming history of the Second Amendment By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; City Lights Publishers how will we as a nation ever break through the stalemate on gun vio- lence to achieve restrictions on the proliferation of death-dealing weapons and their ammunition and accessories? One way to start, suggests Rox- anne Dunbar-Ortiz in this short vol- ume, is by understanding the real origins of the Second Amendment that the iconic myths have so obfus- cated. No, the real purpose had almost nothing to do with resistance to an oppressive colonial government, or the rugged individualism of frontiersmen and hunters. Dunbar-Ortiz, a longtime chronicler of the history of indigenous peoples in the United States, has a far more sordid story to tell. "The kind of militias and gun rights of the Second Amendment" had "two primary roles," she writes—"destroying Native communities in the march to possess the continent and brutally subjugating the enslaved African population." Settler colonialism was the first goal, arming militias and house- holds to serve as the frontline for the control and slaughter of Native peoples, communities, and nations, as the means to seize their land. Across much of the South, this land grab led to expansion of cotton cultivation for slave plantations, as well as pushing the boundaries of the U.S. from the original 13 colonies to the Pacific. Second was the symbiotic relationship between guns and the pro- tection of slavery, fueled by the fear of slave rebellions, runaways, and other resistance. Several of the slave states even had laws mandating white males to own and carry firearms and requiring militias to create slave patrols with stiff penalties on white people who refused to serve. Dunbar-Ortiz calls the slave patrols "the origin of policing in the United States." There's a common thread to both what she calls the "savage war" against Native peoples and defending and securing the evil of slav- ery: virulent racism. Thus the basis for the perpetuation of gun vio- lence directed at African-Americans after the abolition of slavery in the form of mob violence and the activity of the Ku Klux Klan, a thread that continues today in police shootings as well as mass shootings and other gun violence carried out primarily by white men, often motivated by white supremacy. (Misogyny, of course, is another key factor today, a point understated by the author). Other countries, notably Australia, have eradicated the plague of mass shootings and limited gun violence, but they don't have the barrier of the Second Amendment, or the mythology cloaked around it, especially "the privileging of individual rights over collective rights" that is so intrinsic to U.S. political culture, says Dunbar- Ortiz. Focus alone on curbing the National Rifle Association (NRA) will not end this nightmare, she concludes, citing a University of Califor- nia Santa Barbara professor who writes the NRA "has built some- thing that gun control advocates lack: an organized base of grassroots power"—in other words, the only way to achieve any real social change in the United States. —Charles Idelson No Apparent Distress: A doctor's coming of age on the front lines of American medicine By Rachael Pearson, MD; W.W. Norton & Company i'm going to take the somewhat unusual step for a book review by say- ing this right off: Read this book! This is an extraordinarily well crafted and deeply moving book. It tells the story of a young woman's medical education set against the backdrop of a disastrous hurricane, the slow-rolling catastrophe of modern American health care, and the particular ways it fails poor people and people of color. Pearson comes from a "working poor" family and clearly is someone who was able to make her way to higher education and medical school through sheer undeniable ability. And she is one of those too-rare physicians clearly motivated by the pas- sionate desire to serve. She tells the story of her own somewhat eccentric upbringing and the circuitous path that leads her to medi- cal school at the University of Texas at Galveston. She chooses that school partly for its history of serving the poor and medically under- served community around it. And then she arrives to a dual disaster: A devastating hurricane that disproportionately impacts the poor, black residents of Galveston and the decision by the university hos- pital to essentially abandon its prior commitment to serving the poor. We all remember the story of Katrina. Many NNU nurses volun- teered in the aftermath. And many learned at least some of the back- story not well covered in the national news. How the poor and black residents were often relegated to the lowest-lying areas most likely 18 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G J U LY | A U G U S T | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8