National Nurses United

Books_FNL with art 8/20/10 6:02 PM Page 16 and nursing world into two opposing bodies. As Dock put it, "many matrons and sisters aligned with the governors were unwilling to stand forth in opposition to their employers." It's been said that history repeats itself. Many nurse organizers will recognize these divisions remain perversely cemented in today's hospitals and for-profit healthcare industry, but for the social and political vision and collective advocacy efforts of National Nurses United members. Dock quite rightly concluded that it is impossible to differentiate between social movements and health movements, and that the safeguarding of human life has always gone hand in hand with the battle against adverse social conditions. The authors remind us that nurses were the first largescale organizers of independent associations of professional women, socially inspired and scientifically educated experts in their own special art. In this book, readers are invited to contemplate the historical perspective of our modern fight for professional autonomy and cautioned not to forget their proud history of social activism. —DeAnn McEwen, RN Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between By Theresa Brown; HarperOne am not a book reviewer. I do, however, love to read and I am a hematology, oncology, transplant nurse, so when I was asked to review this book subtitled "a new nurse faces death, life, and everything in between," I said, "Sure." I read the book through in one cross-country flight. I enjoyed it; it was a good, quick read and I'd recommend it. It described much of what we do in clear, detailed terms: easy for a non nurse to understand but not boring for a nurse to read. I only found one technical error and actually wondered if Theresa Brown put it in to test all oncology nurses out here. In her book, Brown chronicles her first year working as an adult oncology nurse on two different units. She relates stories about caring for patients and their families coping with the catastrophic illness that is cancer. She shares how she struggles to maintain dignity for her patients, such as how to make patients feel (as much as possible) at ease when facing the many consequences and difficulties of cancer treatment. Sometimes the treatment is as bad as the disease. And most of all, Brown discusses the challenge of seeing, in her words, "the frightening truths about just how frail the human body can be." I have already been where Brown was many times before. Reading the book was like comparing notes with a fellow RN. This is something we do on the job all the time and one of the reasons I love being a nurse, because on a great unit the nurses all work together I 16 N AT I O N A L N U R S E and help and support one another. But if someone had not faced all of these issues before, how would the book read, I wondered? The realities of what we nurses do on a daily basis is not entirely understood by the general public so it might take someone else many tears to read this, or they might find it too much information. My current motto is "None of us get out of here alive." I'm not sure to whom I should attribute this quote so forgive me, but as an oncology nurse I face this daily, even with our great successes and advances in treating cancer and other chronic diseases of the blood. I try to help new nurses learn this before they fall apart as they experience their first deaths. I do, of course, recall my first deaths, very, very clearly and I feel lucky that, in our society which denies the reality of death every day, I have been able to experience others' deaths, understand, reflect, and get to this place. Death is nothing special; it is just a part of living. But most of us in our very antiseptic society that prolongs dying as long as possible with every possible technology don't get to know this first hand. So as a nurse, in a healthcare system that just recently invented the term AND, Allow Natural Death, my first deaths were very difficult. We learn from other more experienced nurses, we learn from patients and their families, and I hope we all feel lucky that we do get this lesson in life, death, and everything in between. Brown captures this very well.—Martha Kuhl, RN Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia By Sheila and Lisa Himmel; Berkeley Books ungry is an apt title for this book about an anorexic daughter and her food-writer mother, but not only for the reasons you think. Sure, when Sheila and Lisa Himmell titled their book Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia, they meant the kind of intense starvation anorexics experience. But they also mean our culture's hunger for perfect female bodies, anorexic or not. And they're referring to deeper hungers: The hunger to be seen, to be loved, to be able to say no, to fill an emptiness inside whose origins are mysterious. Finally, Hungry refers to one mother's voracious need for answers to a disease that changes the minute you think you have a handle on it. The book starts long before Lisa is born, beginning with Sheila Himmel, finicky baby. It leads the reader through the entertaining path of Sheila's food awakening at the hands of her husband Ned's culinary adventuring. It takes us through Sheila's food reviewing with the San Jose Mercury News in California, the birth of their H 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 2 0 1 0

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