PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThat the book challenges pervasive cultural stereotypes of nurses — dispatching with the image of the brow-mopping angel — is a literary relief ... DiGregorio’s storytelling is pitch-perfect ... Taking Care never shouts. It doesn’t need to. But there is quiet anger on every page, especially in the wake of political shifts that render caregiving harder than ever ... Camaraderie on the front lines — the teamwork between nurses, physicians and allied health professionals — felt like an omission ... But perhaps there is strength in DiGregorio’s outsider status. The scope of nursing described here, and the diversity of nurses giving accounts, might not have been possible otherwise.
Perri Klass
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... an ambitious, elegant meditation ... Klass describes inequality and racism with a quiet, powerful rage that underscores the shameful political truths that continue during our contemporary plague ... In the acknowledgments of this book is an almost apologetic disclaimer that Klass does not consider herself a historian or expert in any sense — yet she clearly is an expert in narrative and in medicine. In A Good Time to Be Born, she takes the most complex human patterns of all — history, medicine, politics, art — and knits them into something unique and beautiful ... I did find myself wanting more of Klass’s own story, both the sorrow and hope of a doctor’s work. But this is not a memoir, so she cedes her time to other trailblazing doctors ... This is an important book for many reasons, but that Klass has given voice to the voiceless is perhaps the most significant ... From start to finish, her book reminds us what it means to survive, and just how precious and precarious a state that is.
Rachel Cusk
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksShe is ever present, and yet not present at all, seemingly unmoved by everything. Both Cusk’s prose and Faye’s character are a study in subtlety and control ... Transit makes no apologies for this limited view of the world. And why should it, in its experimental bluntness and forthrightness. The prose blends cool, pared-back observations with beautifully textured sentences ... At the heart of Transit is the idea that we long to feel real, and to be seen, particularly as we age. Cusk treats the themes of invisibility, aging, and womanhood with acute precision by allotting them absence and silence. Faye, shadowy and hardly seen by others, offers a portrait of a state shared by other women.
