Code Gray

February 1, 2022

In Race and Reckoning, Cose (The Rage of a Privileged Class) argues that throughout U.S. history racial bias has always shaped key decisions and events (25,000-copy first printing). Ten years in the making, journalist Fairbanks's The Inheritors follows three everyday South Africans over five decades to reveal how the end of apartheid unfolded. From Hager, historian-in-residence at the Presidential Pet Museum, All-American Dogs is organized by historical era to chronicle the 31 U.S. presidents who have kept canines within petting distance at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (100,000-copy first printing; four-color illustrations). Ranging from the early 1800s to the early 2000s, Livingstone reveals the manifold accomplishments of The Women of Rothschild (40,000-copy first printing). In Code Gray, ER physician Nahvi highlights the daily ethical questions faced by doctors in his position (50,000-copy first printing). In Nerd, New York Times critic at large Phillips, who writes about theater and poetry as well as film, shows how pop-culture fan favorites from Star Wars to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Doctor Who have shaped her--and have much to tell us about society at large (50,000-copy first printing). A multi-award-winning British author who specializes in French history and culture--his biographies of Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac were all New York Times Best Books--Robb now gives us France from Gaulish times 'til COVID-19. Journalist-turned-money manager Steinmetz (The Richest Man Who Ever Lived) introduces us to an American Rascal--Jay Gould, richer than Rockefeller or even Croesus and the reason Wall Street's first financial reforms were instituted (50,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling science writer Yong reveals how animals other than humans perceive their surroundings in An Immense World.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2022
A memoir from an emergency room physician and professor of emergency medicine at the school of medicine at Dartmouth. ER memoirs have become a reliable genre, delivering vivid accounts of tragedies, deaths, lifesaving heroics, wacky anecdotes, and social commentary, but this addition is a cut above many of them. Nahvi begins in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic, which decimated hospitals and emergency departments. Medical personnel died along with civilians, and ignorance ruled. For example, when effective N95 masks were in short supply, the CDC changed their guidelines to approve ineffective masks as an "acceptable alternative," which was like "redefining a baseball cap as an acceptable alternative to a hard hat." Readers settling in for the usual entertaining, gruesome ER fireworks may be unsettled at the end of the first chapter when Nahvi calls a halt. He writes that Covid-19, however extreme, forced him to see life not as newly strange and challenging, but for the strange and challenging reality it always was. He then proceeds to describe his experiences as an emergency physician in a pre-pandemic world; as he shows, the job often lacks satisfying climaxes and answered questions: A patient with an annoying cough comes to the ER where a scan shows metastatic cancer, and Nahvi must break the news. A young wife complains of vague abdominal pains for days and then suddenly collapses. The author is clear that paramedics and ER personnel do their best, but his text is not focused on stories of dramatic rescues or revealing bizarre causes of death. Rather, he writes about deciding what to say to the husband who has witnessed everything. He also describes how he reassured a woman who arrived with severe chest pain. All tests are normal, but she showed no pleasure at news that her heart and lungs appeared healthy because her life was miserable in other ways. Nahvi is a capable, compassionate guide to these difficult moments. A moving, thoughtful memoir of life in the medical trenches.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.