5 comments about First Person Plural: My Life As a Multiple.

1. Just a true story of a family and the affects of a MPD father on that family. Down to earth. Showing how and what the family memebers could do to support the father. I was happy to see a family unit working together. There is very little technical, big words describing MPD
   but from the patients view and family. It is a story. Not a school book that is cold with descriptions and theories. Helped me a lot.



2. I bought this book in a second hand bookstore and before I finished the first chapter I was already distracted by West's appalling overuse of groan-inducing metaphors. This book must contain the largest collection of bad metaphors ever published. You can scarely turn a page without being assaulted by another embarrassingly dreadful metaphor, or an irrelevant, boasting description of his cars, clothes, appliances, etc. The impression I was left with (besides the fact that this guy REALLY should have gotten someone else to write the book for him, or at the very least should have found a competent editor), is that it's fake. I don't doubt that Mr. West has psychological issues, but more than anything, you get the impression that this is a man who craves attention. It's obvious that West wrote the story with a movie in mind, as it reads like a bad screen play. I believe in DID, but I don't believe Mr. West.



3. This is a book for people who are truely interested in Ego State Theory. Also, it is a very informative and engaging book for people who have been diagnosed with DID. Cameron West brings his personal struggles to the public and is able to impart his angst as well as his optimism to readers.



4. A very harrowing account of what multiple personality disorder can do to a life, in addition to being a rather stunning portrait of what the human mind can be capable of. It also tells the story of his wife and child who try and cope with his disease. The book is occasionally melodramatic, especially the subplot about his worries of infidelity. While the writing can feel self conscious and some passages seem to be using words in a way to sound "literary", it is a riveting work and a quick read.



5. as a reader who is just a reader, not someone experienced with this illness, my review should be read as such. there was more that i didn't like about this novel than i liked. i immediately draw offense at writers who describe everyone by their physical or material attributes (everyone wears brand names and is "handsome"?? how beautiful must the US psychiatric scene be!! lucky everyone has a mercedes), and found the dialogue slow and, amazingly, the content simple. i would have liked to hear more in depth from the "alters" who particularly appealed to me such as Clay and Bart - maybe whole chapters so we could get a sense of them and how their lives were structured. maybe not possible? in short, multiple disappointments, as i read this book imagining the author (who is, coincidentally, "handsome") selling the film rights and talking about it to Oprah without knowing he'd actually done same. talk about mind-reading.

5 comments about Mystic Nurse: Four Years in the ER.

1. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, Pat Colwell became an RN at the age of 45 after 20 years working with computers. He went to work in an ER and soon realized that it was the relationships with his coworkers combined with a strong faith in God that helped him through the difficult times.
   
   I have never been an ER nurse. After reading Pat's book I came away with a very clear picture of what an ER nurse goes through on a daily basis. The emotional impact of dealing with constant trauma and death took its toll and he eventually had to leave.
   
   The book is not all gloom and doom. He describes some very funny incidents involving metal rings and camp stoves as well as occasions when the other staff had reason to tease him.
   
   He does not emphasis the life and death drama of the ER as much as he does the support and encouragement he received from other nurses and the doctors. In a world where nurses are said to "eat their young" it is refreshing to see someone do the opposite.



2. Attention fellow SN's, especially those second or third career changers.
   
   Recently, I had the privilege of exchanging correspondence via my Blog with a former IT Refugee turned ED Nurse. This gentleman actually had the gumption to write a book about it; Bravo!
   
   I read it in a matter of days, in between studying for my last Micro Exam (can you say Oy Vey!). Turns out, this was not just another RN facts and data book, nor was it another tale of and RN on the job. This book provides a practical, well-rounded, and somewhat unique perspective; a former Systems Analyst, Father, and second-career ED RN. This is a memoir told from the heart.
   
   From the beginning, Nurse Colwell shares his experiences from making the decision to become an RN, to his first day on the job, until his very difficult decision to leave the ED for another department. Even more intriguing is his depiction of other RN's and Doctor's in the ER. He tells us of the strong bond fellow ED Doctors, Nurses, and Techs all have in this "Front-Line" RN position.
   
   The relationships are what I personally found most interesting in the book. It is comforting to know this fellowship exists and that we, and newly minted RN's, will not (for the most part) be asked to stand alone through any difficult moment throughout our careers.
   
   I recommend this book to ALL SN's as it gives us a glimpse of what's to come, from a very practical and well-rounded perspective.



3. I have read several books by physicians recounting their careers, but this is the first book that I have read written by a nurse recounting his career so far. I was not disappointed.
   
   I found this book to be an excellent read. It is in part accounts of patient encounters over 4 years and then the author's insights into all of this. He has the ability to bring you into each episode so that you can both see it and feel the emotions experienced. In his 4 years experience he pretty well covered the field as far as the variety of things seen in a busy medium sized city emergency room.
   
   Not only does he paint the pictures of the events he lived through, the author was able to have the reader look into the souls of the individuals involved, both patients and nurses, and perhaps us physicians.
   
   One difference between physicians and nurses, it seems that nursing brings a person closer to the patient. The only thing that may be closer is being a husband or family care-giver to someone who is sick, a role which many of us may have to take.
   
   I have felt that one of the keys for success for a physician is to both respect and listen to the nursing staff that he or she works with.
   
   Again I commend the author that he took time and effort to put his experiences and feelings into print. We are all better off for his efforts.



4. As a fellow nursing student myself, working in an ICU Step-Down as an intern, interested in ED work after graduation, and a male... I liked the book only due to the fact that there really is not anything else written from this point of view in this area of practice. Nursing needs more literature written by nurses about nursing, both written for the nursing professional audience and for public understanding of such a complex job... but not in the same book. Unfortunately, this book's writing and grammer are really bad. It's not well organized and skips between layperson descriptions and medically-trained references without layperson explainations. I would perhaps recommend it to people in my similar situation, but not anyone else... maybe if the price were $2.50, but not for $16 with shipping. Sorry for the poor review. I do very much appriciate the work nonetheless. Please keep up the writting, though, since everything is rough in the beginning.



5. This is the type of book you can read in an afternoon or a plane ride. I really like the anecdotes and the feel. I also understanding nursing in the ER much better, which I think is good for the profession. However, I don't feel that I ever got to know the author as well as I wanted to. Also, one of the final chapters just doesn't seem to fit at all with the rest of the book, as if the author wrote it separately and just stuffed it in. The anecdotes sound a bit sanitized at times, not the brutal emotion I read about in blogs by ER nurses. Spelling and grammar don't always match (`Beth#1' early on becomes `Beth one' later).

1 comments about The Rollercoaster: A Country Couple's Ride with IVF.

1. This book describes the journey of the author and her husband through several attempts of IVF treatment. I felt privileged to share in the hopes, the excitement,the joys and the disappointments that were so eloquently described. "Rollercoaster", must surely bring comfort to other couples enduring the stresses of infertility treatments,if only to realise that they are certainly not alone,in experiencing the emotional turmoils that are so brilliantly expressed in this book.

No comments about Patients Are a Virtue.

No comments about White Rabbit: A Doctor's Story of Her Addiction and Recovery.

No comments about Leading with My Heart.

No comments about Bedside Manner.

No comments about The Pain Chronicles: Recollections of a Chronic Pain Sufferer.

No comments about A Life of Ernest Starling (People and Ideas Series) (People and Ideas Series).

5 comments about James Herriot: The Life of a Country Vet.

1. The most positive thing about this book is that it shows you what Jim Wight (James Herriot's son) was up against when he wrote his memoir. I highly recommend Jim Wight's memoir for anyone who is interested in learning about James Herriot (Alf Wight).

   I think Mr. Lord may have been well-meaning when he wrote James Herriot: Life of a Country Vet but the book is really appallingly bad. Mr. Lord has no feel for the WWII period, has done no practical research, seems to have little to no perception of human character and relies almost exclusively on gossip and word-of-mouth. One gets the impression that Mr. Lord decided before writing his book what he was going to find and proceeded to twist or ignore any information to the contrary. He relies on those "witnesses" who will tell him what he wants to hear without taking into consideration the inherent complexity of human beings. Witnesses do not always tell the truth--it is a gross error in judgment to think that one person can fully, and accurately, explain another person.

   The lack of reliable facts results in Mr. Lord relying almost exclusively on guesswork, and the assumptions inherent in Mr. Lord's guesswork are almost all negative. For instance, he assumes that because he, Mr. Lord couldn't find evidence that Alf Wight's parents were musicians, ergo, they weren't, therefore Alf Wight was lying when he referred to his parents as professional musicians. The point may be debatable but in the interests of good writing, the assumption is not enough. If Mr. Lord wasn't willing to do the required research to prove the point conclusively one way or the other, he should have left it out.

   Mr. Lord strikes one as the kind of man who is continually surprised by the inconsistencies of human nature. He reports with something like glee that Alf once told someone that his father died in 1961, instead of 1960. This becomes evidence for . . . the mind boggles. I'm not sure Mr. Lord himself has a clue what he is trying to accomplish in this book. Whatever it is, it suffers from an utter lack of scholarship and is therefore deeply insulting both to Alf Wight's memory and to the reader.




2. Graham Lord is not a hack or a fraud, but he clearly wrote this book without any cooperation from the family of James Herriot (Alfie Wight), and it shows in an abominable lack of actual information about Herriot's life before meeting Lord or of Herriot's life as a vet. He also makes far too much about the fact that Herriot was writing compelling stories based on actual incidents rather than serving only as a journalist, but since his connection to Herriot was only through his books and some occasional personal contact, there was little else he could write. The book is infuriating in the extent to which it substitutes information about the times in which Herriot lived for actual information about Herriot: knowing nothing of Herriot's life growing up, Lord talks endlessly about the life of other people who grew up in the same neighborhood as Herriot, and historical records and newspapers were obviously his primary source, along with people who didn't live in Thirsk and who had limited contact with Herriot.

   The inadequacies of this book inspired Jim Wight (Herriot's son) to write a truly revealing biography entitled The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father, and Lord is to be thanked for that. He did his best with what little information he had, but there is no escaping the fact that he had too little information, and having read the son's memoir, I quickly found Lord's book unbearable and started skimming after a couple of chapters in the hopes of finding SOMETHING I hadn't already learned from Wight's book. I was not successful.




3. I couldn't agree more with the other reviews posted about this book. It reminded me of the biography of John Lennon I once tried to read. After reading a very short time I put down the book never to reopen it, feeling as if I needed a shower. It's as if the author is trying to elevate himself by bringing down the subject by exposing all his "faults" to the world. Researching would seem to be the most important component to writing a biography (along with the ability to write), and neither are in evidence here. Graham Lord relies on information and viewpoints from only a few sources and none of them close family or friends. Much of the writing is spent on exposing Wight's inconsistancies between his real life and his writing. Why this is so important is beyond me. I believe Wight started every story with an idea based on experience, and expanded it into the charming chapter he presented to us in his books. I also believe many of the stories were accurate retellings of episodes in his career with only names and exact circumstances altered. Instead of focusing on what would be the central core to Alfie Wight's life and writing, Graham Lord has seemingly gathered all the peripheral innuendo and "juicy" tidbits surrounding that core and for some reason presented them here in his book. A real laugher for me is the chapter ending with the dramatic announcement of Wight's nervous breakdown. Simply awful, awful writing.
   You would think the movies and television shows would only have a very small part in a biography considering how long Alfie Wight lived, but in this book far to much is written about them and many of the photo's used are also directly from them.
   A book like this reminds me of a movie like "Plan 9 From Outer Space". It is so bad in all areas that you can almost derive some enjoyment out of reading it. If you want to read a real biography of James Herriot, done with real research, real writing ability and real inside information, read the biography by his son, Jim Wight. I find it interesting that this is Jim Wight's first attempt at writing and I find it quite good. Graham Lord has written many things and his biography is not so good. So you never know. Cheers.



4. This book is not even worth turning the first page! This is one of those books where you actually feel embarrassment for the author. The book is poorly researched, poorly written, poorly edited, and well...... words just fail me. While I am not a great Herriot fan, I do have to give him, Herriot his due, the man could write well and could tell a great story (isn't that what authors are suppose to do?). This guy though, Graham Lord, I suspect, has problems feeding the paper into his typewriter! The entire book is such a obvious ploy to make some quick money on the shirttail of a "dead" but popular author it is rather nauseating. Shame on the publisher for accepting such shoddy work! I did finish the book though (thank God I did not purchase the thing) because each page became worse and worse and I could not stop, my thinking being with each turn of the page "well it just cannot be any worse than that last page/chapter." How wrong I was! If you must read the thing, borrow it or check it out of the library. I would hate to see a person waste their money, and I certainly would not want the author and his publisher to be rewarded for a work such as this. Herriot's life, warts and all, could be such a fastinating subject. I do hope someone will turn out a good study of him eventually. We certainly did not get it here. I just hate having to give this one even one star. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!



5. Mr. Lord could have written a good book. He has the tools and the know-how, and he did his research. He made one fatal error, however. Actually he made not one, but two mistakes. The first mistake is that his starting point is wrong. As a trained journalist, he does as a journalist does - he keeps trying to find "dirt", or rather manufacture dirt - all in order to give us a "balanced view". One can't help feeling, as one reads interview after interview, that Mr. Lord has somehow picked only the disgruntled, caustic and jealous remarks to print. The second mistake was in underestimating "James Herriot"'s fans, and familys goodwill towards him. He treats his subject manner as just another subject, as routine grist for the gossip mill, but Alf Wight was not that kind of person. He was a person totally out of Mr. Lord's scope and understanding. He underestimated Mr. Wight's fans and family's tolerance for having his name besmearched, and, indeed, his son wrote another book in response, a beautiful book about his father, and in it he easily refutes all Mr. Lord's accusations - and turns Mr. Lord into a laughingstock. Because anybody who has read the two books side by side - which I just did - would realize that Mr. Lord has indeed made a laughingstock of himself.
   
   While there are some good parts to the book, they are very much overshadowed by the other parts. There are two good chapters - in the middle - which were written factually - the chapters dealing with the content of James Herriot's first books, and the publishing history. There is a good reason why this is so - Mr. Lord was indeed part of the publishing business and would have been privy to that sort of information.
   
   But much of the book is exactly what he accuses James Herriot of writing - pure fiction. It would take too long to point out every one of Mr. Lord's mistakes, but I would like to simply write just a few of the many mistakes Mr. Lord makes. The rest, if you still want to read this book, you could find out for yourself.
   
   The first accusation Mr. Lord makes about James Herriot is that Alf Wight did not write a semi-autobiography, but rather pure fiction. He maintains that even if this were so, it would not matter, because the books are still entertaining. With that salve to his conscience, he methodically starts to take apart many stories in an effort to prove them fiction.
   
   His first assertion - that it would not matter if it were actually fiction, is simply not true. It would matter, and matter a lot, to both his fans and friends and family. His son says as much in his book- that it would matter a lot if his books are fiction. Fortunately for us, Mr. Lord does not bring a single proof that could stand up to scrutiny. His method seems to be - I don't think this story is true, so it's probably not. That's it. Not one single proof. For instance, he says that Alf Wight's memoirs of his war years are fiction - because the dates are wrong. He says that Alf Wight joined the army in March, 1941, and was discharged two years later, and therefore his story that he was called up to the RAF while his wife was expecting their first child is a fictional story. His son, in his book "The Real James Herriot" explains that he enlisted in the RAF in March, but was NOT CALLED UP until 15 months later, in November 1942, when his wife was indeed, expecting their first child. Is it possible his son and wife might know when he joined the RAF better than Mr. Lord? Especially since Mr. Lord actually admits that he is going from hearsay - since the RAF would not give Mr. Lord access to their records, claiming that they were still classified? This should be enough of a blooper to discredit Mr. Lord; however, there are many, many more - so many that it would be funny if it were not also very, very sad that someone could so easily print a book full of lies and get away with it (by prefacing all his explanations with "perhaps" he covers himself from libel, I suppose).
   
   Another example of Mr. Lord's innuendos - he quotes from one of Mr. Herriot's books that James Herriot was taken aback by the red (and squished) face of his newborn son, and asked the nurse if there was something wrong with the child. Mr. Lord asks how can this story be true if he is a vet? Just so, explains his son, animals are born much more fully formed than humans are. (A horse is born already able to walk as soon as he is born). Mr. Lord falls flat in the mud.
   
   Mr. Lord quotes James Herriot as saying that 90% of his stories are based on real life. Mr. Lord asks how that can be - when the Herriot books say that he joined Seigfried's practice in 1937, when he actually started working there in 1941? Mr. Lord, I think we are ready for a lesson in English. Do you know what the words "based on true life" means? "Based" means "based", not "actually, exactly, fact". When he first started writing, he was hoping to remain anonymous, and therefore disguised his stories so that the people he was writing about would not recognize themselves. He changed the location of his practice to the Dales, he changed the dates, he even changed the characters - some from a man to a woman, for example. He put two stories into one, etc. etc. This all falls under the heading of "based on real life".
   
   There are many, many more examples of this in his book - where he "proves" that James Herriot was writing fiction - and he has no proof whatsoever. Not even one single time.
   
   If there is one person writing fiction, that person is Mr. Lord. Mr. Lord spends two entire chapters on a conjecture of how Alf's childhood might have been like - all based on the assumption that Alf had grown up in grinding poverty. These chapters become almost a farce when we read his sons portrayal of his real childhood - although his parents were not rich they were certainly never poor, and Alf had a very happy childhood. He also explains the economics of why this was so. Which puts Mr. Lord's two chapters of conjecture on how Alf's unhappy childhood might have been like in the category it deserves - pure fiction. While the poverty of the under-class in Glasgow in the 1920's is certainly very sad, it definitely does not belong in a biography of Alf Wight.
   
   Another mistake that Mr. Lord makes is that he constantly contradicts himself. For example, in one chapter he spends many paragraphs conjecturing on why Alf was always poor, when he should have had a thriving practice - and the fanciful castles he builds in the air are very elaborate indeed. And yet in another chapter he quotes a neighbor as saying - "oh, they claimed they didn't have any money but that wasn't true. They had money for everthing - a tennis court, ballet lessons for Rosie, etc." This came across as a vitriolic statement, but of course in contradiction to his earlier assumption that he was poor. Mr. Lord, you can't really have it both ways, can you?
   
   Another example - he constantly quotes Eddie Steanton throughout the book, with all kinds of outrageous comments, yet he himself quotes one of Eddie's colleagues "oh, Eddie always exaggerates, you can't believe everything he says". And later in the book it comes out that Eddie had had a falling out with Alf Wight, and I would assume that his "memories" might be somewhat tainted by those sentiments. And yet Mr. Lord accepts Mr. Streaton as a fully credible source.
   
   As matters stand now, this book is laughable and barely deserving of a review - except for one thing: if Mr. Wight's son would not have written his own biography, Mr. Lord's fictious book would have remained as the factual biography of Alf Wight. He would have succeeded in besmirching Alf Wight's name with his book full of lies (oh, excuse me, fiction). The fact that his son wrote his own biography, and a beautiful and moving one at that, has turned Mr. Lord's book into a joke, a book that his fans would not touch with a ten-foot pole, but Mr. Lord did not know that in advance. He tried to change James Herriot's fans opinion of their idol, by trying to find "dirt" on him, and that was a very low thing. The fact is that he fortunately did not succeed, but that does not take away from what Mr. Lord tried to do.
   
   Mr. Lord, shame on you!