Two Stars

During a training on equity and social justice, the leader showed a bit of Simon Sinek’s talk on “Starting with Why”. She only showed a couple of minutes, but I was intrigued enough to buy his book.

The Good
The underlying concept is interesting and I think pretty useful. While the book is focused on success in the business world, I think the concept is sound when applied in other sectors and even one’s personal life. The theory is this: most companies can say what they do (build computers), and most can communicate how they do it (using great technology, sturdy resources, intelligent staff), but the truly successful companies can say WHY they do what they do. ‘Starting with Why’ means looking beyond the traditional ‘I do it to make money’ concept to pinpoint what your real reasons are for doing something. Once that’s been identified, you should make choices that align with your ‘Why.’ The big examples he uses to illustrate this are Southwest Airlines, Apple, and Wal-Mart (before the founder died). As far as concepts go, it’s not bad.

The Bad
But the bad is so bad. On my e-reader version, the book is 246 pages long. It wasn’t until page 108 that a woman appeared. All of Mr. Sinek’s examples were of cis men who started businesses or were leaders; the vast majority of them were also white men. Martin Luther King Jr. does get discussed, but other than him? It’s like a nightmare – a bunch of white dudes talking about how awesome they are.

The first mention of a woman is a woman in the military, too. So he didn’t find a woman who had started a company that fit his theory; he had to look in the military. Hmmm. His second reference to a woman comes another fifty pages later, and it’s not even a reference to an actual human. You know how sometimes authors alternate the generic pronouns they use when illustrating a point? “If someone wants to do x, he should…” or “If someone wants to do y, she should…”? Well, only once did I catch Mr. Sinek using a female pronoun … and it was in a situation describing being emotional. REALLY?! Dude. It’s like satire at this point. Very few women mentioned, and when mentioned it’s focused on non-business work or on emotion.

There are also some fairly white-savior moments, like when he was describing an organization founded to ‘help’ kids in the Middle East ‘realize they can do more.’ Um, hmmm. Perhaps that organization was different than described, but in reality it sounds like a pet project a rich white kid decided to do without really looking at what the community needed. Not exactly something to shout about. He also uses such demonstrably false phrases as “Working hard leads to winning.” Sometimes is does lead to winning, but sometimes (many times, depending on where you start in life) it does not.

Overall
As I said, the concepts aren’t bad, and I actually plan to apply them to my working life. But I definitely do not recommend the book. Watch the Ted talk. Maybe see if he has an article out there you could read. But save yourself the headache of plowing through an unintentionally whitewashed, male-centric version of history as told by Mr. Sinek.

Four Stars

Still on vacation, a friend mentioned this book and I was reminded that I wanted to read it. I’d heard about it a lot (although wasn’t clear on what it was exactly about), and much like the Hunger Games trilogy, I figure if I’m going to end up seeing the movie, maybe I should read the book. I started it at 10AM, and with the exceptions of stopping for lunch and a trip to the pioneer cemetery, I read non-stop until 6PM, when I finished it. It’s good. It’s not my favorite book, and it’s not without issues, but I think it’s a good book.

It’s a little easy to predict what’s going to happen in it (I thought), and some components are super fantastical to the point of absurd, but maybe that is how the world of wish-granting works? Either way, I appreciated the fact that the parents were treated as humans and, more importantly, these young adults were treated as humans. They have complex thoughts and feelings, are forced to be mature without necessarily wanting to be that mature, and have inner lives that aren’t just focused on their CANCER.

I’d be interested in the perspective from kids who have actually gone through the things outlined in this book – is it a realistic portrayal of some of their lives? If it isn’t, it still is an interesting story, with some moments that really resonate. I didn’t finish it thinking “I must change my life forever, and live for the people who can’t,” but I did finish it with the reminder that things are shitty and things are great but most of all, that things ARE and I need to continue experiencing these things even when I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep for days. And while I’m not the target for this book, it certainly is something I needed right about now.

Three Stars

I’m currently in the middle of reading Book 4 of A Song of Ice and Fire, but once again I made the mistake of trying to read it right after finishing the previous book. It just doesn’t work – I need a break. So I asked my friend Jen, who is an author (and the maker of these amazing literature-themed perfumes) and an overall fun woman, for some recommendations. She suggested these YA novels by Gail Carriger.

I’ve heard of but never read any steampunk, but it’s possible that I’m going to become a big fan, assuming this book is a good representation of it. Set in a floating finishing / spy school, this book follows Sophronia as she tries to figure out what’s going on at the school, which is run by an oblivious head mistress and has both a vampire and a werewolf on staff. Is this what steampunk usually is? Because AWESOME.

The book is YA and a pretty quick read; 300 pages took me about two days to get through. At times I was a little taken out of the story because the names of the technology are absurd, and some of the character names sound a bit like ones I would have come up with when I was writing short stories in elementary school. But beyond that, I think the characters are interesting and the setting is pretty cool. The writing is fine, although the plot took a while to develop and then suddenly was done. However, the book is the first in a series, so I think a lot of it was about developing the characters and the background of the school to set the tone for the next book. Which I will be reading, possibly starting tonight.

[Note: This review was written before I started the ‘second’ book and realized that I’d read them out of order. Um, whoops.]

I’m doing it again! Off we go for Cannonball Read 6 …

If you’ve read my previous reviews, you might recall that I work in emergency preparedness. This book was on my radar for 2014, and was lent to me by a coworker before I left work on New Year’s Eve. I spent most of my day off yesterday reading it, and finished it up walking to work and on my lunch break today. The book is nearly 500 pages long, so that should tell you about the quality of the writing. Five Days at Memorial is a fantastic book, and one that I would recommend to anyone interested in Hurricane Katrina, medical ethics, or just great investigative journalism.

The book is broken into two parts: a description of the eponymous situation, which took place during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina at a private hospital in New Orleans, and the investigation into the actions of some of the doctors (one in particular) and the nurses involved. It also raises two separate but related questions: what is appropriate for clinicians to do when faced with disastrous circumstances in a healthcare facility, and is what the doctor and nurses are alleged to have done at Memorial in line with that? Finally, another issue of interest that gets mentioned but is not the focus of the book is the responsibility of hospitals and the state have to be prepared for foreseeable disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

The basic situation at Memorial was similar to one facing many hospitals in 2005 (and, as shown with NYU Langione during Hurricane Sandy, was still an issue in 2012): the generator and many necessary electrical switches of the major hospital were in the basement or ground floor of the building and thus susceptible to flooding. When the levees stopped functioning the days after Hurricane Katrina came and went, the flooding reached Memorial and resulted in a generator that ultimately petered out. That, coupled with the inability to quickly evacuate patients, meant that the clinicians, patients, and other family members at the hospital faced very unpleasant circumstance. By the time everyone was evacuated, many patients had died, including many who died in a three hour period on the last day.

The writing, the research, and the story Ms. Fink weaves together is gripping. It’s heartbreaking, and as someone who works in emergency management, it is one of my worst fears. The lack of planning, the lack of preparation, the lack of support from the parent company, it all is just devastating and infuriating. And yet … the hospital never ran out of food, or water. Clinicians were, for the most part, able to do amazing things in an utterly foul situation. But the big question around why did so many patients die on that last day, and whether Dr. Pou made the decision to help death along for those patients, is the focus. And while Dr. Pou makes public statements about doing ‘what she had to do,’ my take-away from this book is that while there certainly are times when this might be true, this specific instance, at this hospital, was not a situation where that statement needed to be made so far as euthanasia is concerned.

Dr. Pou seems sketchy, and seemed to make HER case be about a hypothetical situation that she was never really facing (and would not reasonably have thought she was facing), but that she spoke of as if she had indeed experienced it. Based on my reading of this book, what Dr. Pou chose to do to those patients is not an example of making decisions in a no-win situation. Not to spoil it (and stop here if you plan to read the book and are not familiar with the story), but on that last day, the helicopters were there, and those patients could have been evacuated. They weren’t definitely going to die, and Dr. Pou acted as though they were. That seems to be her defense. And while it’s a defense worth interrogating for real situations where the options are death in tons of pain in a day or death easily now, those weren’t the choices facing those patients that day.

As someone interested in medical ethics, I found the discussion of these issues to be well done. The topics of rationing medical care in an emergency, of deciding who should receive treatment first, and who should wait, are issues that need to be resolved. The clinical community is aware of this and is working on it. Hopefully books like this will make the issue more salient in the rest of the community as well.

Five stars.