Book review: The Good Doctor – What Patients Want by Ron Paterson

This book is in bookstores now.

The back cover of this book begins with three thought provoking questions:

• ‘What makes a good doctor?
• Why are there bad doctors out there still practising?
• And how can we protect patients, increase trust and improve medical care?’

Important, critical questions that should be of interest to health professionals, patients, and in fact, everyone. As a health professional, I was immediately intrigued. Every health professional knows of someone they would NOT recommend to the family, or worse, someone they would advise their family to avoid at all costs.

Ron Paterson (Professor of Health Law and Policy at The University of Auckland) knows better than most what makes a bad doctor; he was after all the New Zealand government’s Health and Disability Commissioner for the first decade of this millennium. He has dealt with many complaints, some substantiated, against health professionals. Paterson draws upon this experience in a balanced and rational way; he interweaves international research and cites numerous New Zealand and international examples and in doing so illustrates the complex situation that health professionals find themselves practicing in.

There is little doubt that as the title suggests patients seek (and indeed deserve to have) a good doctor. It is this subjective criterion of good that is challenging and not universally defined  There are many definitions of perceived “good” from a patient perspective: good is a doctor who listens to me; good is a doctor who tells me what I should do; good is a doctor who allows me to make an informed choice; good is a doctor who makes no mistakes.

What is clear is that many of the high profile cases of medical incompetence are in fact criminal acts, and no credentialing nor registration process will prevent those. So what remains to be devised is a system that protects patients and is supportive and not overly onerous on health professionals. Paterson the HDC adopted the motto “Learning , not lynching, Resolution, not retribution”. A rather balanced view don’t you think? And this should be thoroughly achievable? Not easily.

Ron Paterson weaves his way through this complex situation where individual patient management is sometimes not obvious; that a measure of creativity is required; and some mistakes are inevitable. He presents good arguments on all sides.

For readers who are not health professionals, this book will cast some light on a professional that they interact with as patients but possibly know little about other than what they see on American-based hospital dramas. He also delves into the area of web-based medical advice and cautions that whilst it is probably okay to take advise about a hotel from tripadvisor.com, the internet may not be the best place to gain individualised medical advice where the inherent risk is potentially much higher. But many health professionals face-off against Doctor Wiki each day, adding a new burdon to their already challenging job.

For readers who are health professionals, much of this information will not be new; but the collation of data and encouragement to think beyond today will be refreshing. It’s a relatively easy and thought-provoking read, but not one to consume in a weekend. In fact, I think the longer the book is allowed to percolate through your conscious the better.

Reviewed by Gillian Torckler

The Good Doctor – What Patients Want
By Ron Paterson
Published by Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869405922

Tuesday poem: (untitled) by Lynn Jenner

Suspended by my ankles
in a strait-jacket
from some high building,
I extricate myself
in mid air.

While they put the jacket on,
I square my shoulders
and distend my chest
like a cunning horse.

Once I am hanging
safely about their fear
and they are safely
unable to hear the cost,
I dislocate both shoulders.

With my hands still enclosed
in the sleeves of the jacket,
I reach up my back
and fumble the back
buckles Loose.

Then I am entirely free.

From Dear Sweet Harry (page 3) by Lynn Jenner
Published by Auckland University Press
Used with the permission of Auckland University Press

This poem has been posted as part of the Tuesday Poem scheme

Book review: Shift by Rhian Gallagher

This book is in stores now and is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards.

Reviewing a collection of poetry is a much more daunting task than reviewing a book – probably because in many ways poetry is both less familiar and more subjective than prose fiction. While I enjoy poetry, I don’t often pick up a whole book of it, so I approached the task of reviewing Rhian Gallagher’s Shift with a little hesitation.

However, the first (and eponymous) section of Shift quickly won me over, with its lyrical and image-ful depiction of a New Zealand childhood.

Lines like: From trunk into the part between/two large limbs, you climbed./Sometimes wrapped your legs around, dangled, head mid-air threw me headlong back into my own tree-climbing youth, while her poems about her dead (at birth) sister were less familiar but poignant and very real.

The second section is called ‘Butterfly’, and fittingly it seems to have a metamorphosis theme running through it, as Gallagher leaves her South Island home for “the hood/of London streets…”

Gallagher’s depictions of her time “Abroad” (For the first time in your life/you feel free of your story, walking street after street…) will be familiar to anyone who has been on their Kiwi OE. In ‘Butterfly’, Gallagher discovers not only places, but also herself – her feelings, needs and desires; her values and ethos.

Part three, ‘Shore’, brings us back to New Zealand – a homecoming many of us have experienced, tinged with joy and comfort at the familiar places and people, but also with regret for the places and people left behind. Her rediscovery of her home has elements of each of the previous sections echoed in it – the familiar made unfamiliar by time and distance, and the joy of finding places again as if for the first time.

Galaaher’s imagery is concrete and physical – her poems take you to the places she describes, feeling, smelling and tasting along with her. She writes mostly free verse, but immerses assonance, consonance and alliteration within her work, making her words a joy to read aloud inside your head.

She also plays with form – a villanelle, ‘Butterfly’, stood out as one example of this. Bill Manhire described Gallagher as “one of the quiet, astonishing secrets of New Zealand writing.” Now that she has settled back in New Zealand, I suspect we will be hearing a lot more of her.

Reviewed by Renee Boyer-Willisson

Shift
by Rhian Gallagher
Published by Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869404871

Book review: A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Life and Times of Graham Percy by Gregory O’Brien

This book is in stores now and is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards.

In the introduction to this book, Gregory O’Brien catches our attention by defining a micronaut as: ‘someone who dwells on or is moved by small things; he or she is a student of miniature objects or a traveller across minute spaces.’ He goes on to apply this definition to Graham Percy, the New Zealand-born graphic artist, illustrator, typographer and designer ‘who traveled far (Taranaki to London via Auckland) and built a career on the closely observed detail.’

That which the introduction states, the book itself illustrates with nearly two hundred pages of Percy’s varied works, resonant in themselves and enhanced by O’Brien’s lucid artistic analysis and magnetic chronicle of Percy’s life. It would be fair to say that up until recently, Graham Percy’s artwork, particularly the independent work of the last few years of his life (Percy died in 2008), was not that well-known, at least by me.

IMAGE: page spread for pages 60 and 61

A reader such as this, coming fresh to the subject (Percy specifically and art generally), provides an excellent examination of this kind of book. And it turns out that the book passes with flying colours. Which is to say that as I moved through the pages, traveling chronologically along the river of the artist’s life, I was aware of a developing sense of deep pleasure and admiration bordering on awe.

The subject of this awe (sometimes lapsing into envy) was two-fold. Firstly, there is the actual art of Percy: illustrations, designs and paintings – precisely rendered, imaginative, original and often wry. Evidence of a richly lived physical and mental life. Then there is the prose of O’Brien: intelligent, articulate and the product of thoughtful research. (The writer spent several months in the artist’s home in 2009.) Evidence of respect for the reader, who may or may not be familiar with art history and artistic process.

IMAGE: page spread for pages 66 and 67

For the reader, savvy or savage, this should act as a stimulus and a provocation. By this I mean that like the reproduced artwork within its pages, this book provides the opportunity not only to revel in the micronautical genius of the inspired expatriate Graham Percy, but also to contemplate how one might (oxymoronically) follow Percy’s lead in carving an individual path through life.

Reviewed by Aaron Blaker

A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Life and Times of Graham Percy
by Gregory O’Brien
Published by Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869404703

Book review: Thicket by Anna Jackson

This book is in stores now and is a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards.

The title would suggest a nature theme, but it is more the Thicket of human relationships Anna Jackson explores in this short collection, her fifth.

Fairy tales run a red thread through the book. Quite befitting the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Grimm’s fairytales – and Grimm’s fairy tales they all are. Be it Hansel’s abandonment issues, Red Riding Hood discovering in two juxtaposed poems that her mother was a wild child, or the man from The Fisherman and his Wife lamenting his predicament.

In one of my favourite poems Not looking, Feeling Jackson follows a mother into the pit of dust and Lego pieces that is her children’s room:

“Down past everything soft
and forgotten to the very bottom
where I hit the dust and paper scraps
and where I grasp a dream, or a dream
grasps me, entering my fingertips / like sap …”.

I could swear she was talking about my children’s room. It’s like going through the rabbit hole behind paper scraps and odd socks.

My inner linguist was quite taken by the imagery in the poem Indexing. “You index achievements, I index my dreams[..]” and then the last lines “Well. I am in your index / and you are in mine”. I liked the idea of the presence of other people in the inventory of our lives.

Envelope closes with the words:

“But where am I being sent?
And when I arrive, who will open me?
Roughly with a finger or gently with a knife?”.

A threat enveloped in beauty.

How do you approach a collection of poetry? Apart from a strictly academic (metre counting, metaphor categorising) way, I think it can only be approached by the effect it has on the reader, on every individual one. The way it bounces back off us or enters us and grabs hold of us, tells us secrets about ourselves we did not yet know .

Reviewing poetry from the perspective of the reader is always a personal act. In a good collection of poetry we will find what we are looking for, but it will also challenge us to follow new paths down into the depth of our imagination. I invite you to read Thicket and see what it has on offer for you. There is plenty to discover in this Thicket. A deserving finalist for the New Zealand Post Book Award 2012.
Reviewed by Melanie Wittwer

Thicket
Anna Jackson
Auckland University Press
ISBN 9781869404826

Tuesday poem: Envelope by Anna Jackson

I stick a stamp on an envelope.
It is a lake, a little glassy, and a mountain, behind the lake.
A little bit of lake is left behind on my tongue.

I would not like to be a fish in that lake.
A little bit of me would always be going missing.
I would always be leaving the lake for the mountain.

And now, it is several days later.
I am waiting for a reply.
Then I see that the stamp is still attached to me.

So that explains my demonic energy lately!
That explains how I rose so high so fast,
what everyone means when they refer to my depth.

But where am I being sent?
And when I arrive, who will open me?
Roughly, with a finger, or gently, with a knife?

by Anna Jackson
From Thicket (page 35)
Published by Auckland University Press
Used with the permission of Auckland University Press

This poem is part of the Tuesday Poem Scheme

Tuesday poem: Today is the Piano’s Birthday by Michael Harlow

Today is the piano’s birthday. Yesterday it was found weeping in the garden. Mother was not there, father was gone. But today is the piano’s birthday . . .

Under the balalaika tree the children touch it. The piano’s foot-pedals hum.

Hurrah! shout the children. The piano is on holiday! They sing the birthday song. They bound up and down. They strike the exact note without looking, without looking the piano writes a song for the children . . .

Plinking, planking, plonk – the piano conducts the children through a small wood of ivory. The children sing with their feet. They call to mother who is dreaming on the lawn, to father who is at the office polishing his machines . . .

The piano falls into a dream. The children listen. From far off, birds with the faces of women enter the garden. They lie down. They call to the children. The children listen. They lean into the darkness. They decide. They curl inside the piano’s birthday. The children are the size of a crotchet. The piano grows around them.

The piano is being dreamed. The children are the stories. They are listening . . .   to mother wake on the lawn and touch the space around her   . . . to father close the office door . . .
And today is the piano’s birthday.

If we listen – we can hear mother call them, we can hear father enter the house, carefully. If we listen – we can hear the very first song the children sing, the very first dream the piano dreams . . . we can hear . . . mother and father touch each other with wonder . . .

by Michael Harlow
From Today is the Piano’s Birthday   (Auckland/Oxford UP, 1981)
Used with the permission of Auckland University Press
This poem is part of the Tuesday Poem Scheme

Email digest: Wednesday 29 February 2012

Events
Hamish Clayton, Bill Manhire & Harry Ricketts talk & read at Victoria University Library tomorrow

Book news
Price’s Bookshop in Taupo loved the messages in our recent IndieBound campaign so they printed t-shirts. See them here…

Bucking world economic trends, Corballis’s Pieces of Mind from Auckland University Press sells to Greece 

Turnbull’s chief librarian, Chris Szekely, an Award finalist

NZ Book Month
If you’d like to offer the NZ Book Month voucher for download on your site/blog/whatever then email me at info@booksellers.co.nz

New books
Scholastic New Zealand: March titles

Booksellers: here’s how to order The Flytrap Snaps from Hinterlands Press (in answer to a few calls)

Books to review
We have a bunch (four) book review opportunities on Facebook today – they’re open until Monday

Tuesday poem: (untitled) by Paula Green

He had asked the nurse if she would call
him when it was time to collect her.
We can’t be making hundreds of calls a day,
the nurse snapped, so she snapped right back
and snapped at her for asking personal questions
in the waiting room, and snapped at her for asking
why they had a new phone number, and snapped
at the next woman for snapping right back
so someone wrote DIFFICULT in capital letters
on her chart and everyone tiptoed round her
like she was a ticking time bomb.
She’s actually quite nice, said the night nurse.

From Slip Stream (page 40) by Paula Green
Published by Auckland University Press
Used with the permission of Auckland University Press

This poem is part of the Tuesday Poem Scheme.