Scan barcode
Reviews tagging 'Suicide'
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
2 reviews
thebookbin's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
Wow, what a read.
As a Houstonian who lived through both Katrina and Harvey, the devastation of hurricanes and flooding is not lost on me. I spent days ruminating over this book, and I still feel conflicted about it. While the investigation and reporting of events inside the hospital are some of the most profound words journalism has ever produced, the Part II “aftermath” section is riddled with the author’s biases, especially in a religious sense.
For those not in the know: this book follows the events at Memorial Baptist Hospital in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, in which 45 people died at the hospital and where one doctor and two nurses were charged with accusations of euthanasia. While the investigation of what went on at Memorial is poignant and powerful, Fink’s insistence on framing this entire debate on personal responsibility, while simultaneously letting a corporation she acknowledges as corrupt in passing off the hook is infuriating. Fink describes in detail and had access to Tenet’s (the parent corporation of the hospital) emails where they actively chose not to send aid to the doctors at their own hospital, and yet focuses all her vitriol on the nurses and doctors trapped there with no water, no electricity, limited resources, and dying patients. This is where I believe Fink’s personal religion colors this book to an unacceptable degree that makes this work unworthy of the Pulitzer Prize it won.
Sheri Fink’s disdain for certain topics shines through every snide remark disguised as journalism. She clearly does not agree philosophically with euthanasia. Fink is obviously religious, as she is incapable of removing her biases from her supposed “objective reporting” leads to targeted questions that clearly are intended to discredit the opinions she clearly disagrees with, “Could the societal embrace of suicide for terminally ill or disabled people lead to those groups feeling more worthless, devalued, and abandoned? Would it discount the meaning to be had from family reconnections, insights, forms of spiritual enrichment, and personal growth that may accompany death’s approach?” This quote comes from a passage where Fink is discussing and “airing the debate” of assisted suicide. She seems to have no problems with Jehovah’s Witnesses exorcising their rights to refuse treatment, but holds a palpable and sharp distaste for those who want the power to choose the time and place of their passing and be able to pass along painlessly. Even the veneer of her journalism can’t hide her pompous disdain for the idea. While I personally don’t know enough about medically assisted suicide to have an informed opinion, I have compassion for people who may be considering this route, and am curious enough about the debate to hear arguments and considerations from all sides. But Fink’s biases are so strong I found myself siding in opposition to her, just to spite her obvious attempts to sway my opinion. Towards the end of the book it gets worse. She describes a doctor who went to jail for facilitating a physician assisted suicide of a terminally ill patient in the 90s, and then switches to the perspective of an investigator who, upon reading a newspaper “what she read, made her cry.” She only shows the emotions of the people who’s perspective she agrees with, and somehow that perspective never points any blame at any corporation, government, or system that failed and always on individual people’s actions.
Sheri Fink’s disdain for certain topics shines through every snide remark disguised as journalism. She clearly does not agree philosophically with euthanasia. Fink is obviously religious, as she is incapable of removing her biases from her supposed “objective reporting” leads to targeted questions that clearly are intended to discredit the opinions she clearly disagrees with, “Could the societal embrace of suicide for terminally ill or disabled people lead to those groups feeling more worthless, devalued, and abandoned? Would it discount the meaning to be had from family reconnections, insights, forms of spiritual enrichment, and personal growth that may accompany death’s approach?” This quote comes from a passage where Fink is discussing and “airing the debate” of assisted suicide. She seems to have no problems with Jehovah’s Witnesses exorcising their rights to refuse treatment, but holds a palpable and sharp distaste for those who want the power to choose the time and place of their passing and be able to pass along painlessly. Even the veneer of her journalism can’t hide her pompous disdain for the idea. While I personally don’t know enough about medically assisted suicide to have an informed opinion, I have compassion for people who may be considering this route, and am curious enough about the debate to hear arguments and considerations from all sides. But Fink’s biases are so strong I found myself siding in opposition to her, just to spite her obvious attempts to sway my opinion. Towards the end of the book it gets worse. She describes a doctor who went to jail for facilitating a physician assisted suicide of a terminally ill patient in the 90s, and then switches to the perspective of an investigator who, upon reading a newspaper “what she read, made her cry.” She only shows the emotions of the people who’s perspective she agrees with, and somehow that perspective never points any blame at any corporation, government, or system that failed and always on individual people’s actions.
Fink also seems to completely disregard class consciousness until it serves her. She has no intellectual curiosity on how or why class affected Katrina outcomes, unless it’s to be condescending to her target: Dr. Anna Pou. This ends up reading as absurd, when a billion dollar hospital group was responsible for lack of preparation before, ignoring federal regulations and warnings about their storm-readiness and Fink reports all of this like it’s an afterthought. Ah yes, the entire system failed, the government failed to intervene and when they finally did their efforts were so disorganized they actively hindered rescue operations, but let’s not look any closer there, we definitely can’t investigate corporate malpractice, or even the possibility of personal responsibility for those in charge of the situation—no. We only care about personal responsibility of those not in charge. It’s this hyper-individualistic stance that confirmed for me that this book is religious in nature. She hyper-fixates on Dr. Pou’s wealth, while barely mentioning the two middle-class nurses charged alongside her unless it’s a brief mention of how they struggled financially after their respective arrests. Fink seems desperate to frame this novel as taking down the Big Guy, but instead of doing the more interesting and admittedly harder work of investigating the Big Guy, she chooses a single doctor as the figurehead of the worlds problems and dresses her up as the boogeyman while allowing the actual menacing entity responsible for this tragedy continue to exist unexamined.
Overall, I would say my feelings towards this book are… conflicted. I do think that documenting what went on is important, as is the discussion of euthanasia, medical standards and how they might shift in disasters, and the philosophical and ethical questions of practicing medicine in extenuating circumstances. I just firmly believe this book fails to achieve that to any meaningful degree, and instead reads as a religious manifesto on the sanctity of life, an attempt to take on the Man that was misaimed in a way that lets actual corrupt power fester unchecked.
★★★ DON’T READ THIS UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE ANGRY
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide
detailed discussion of euthanasiahurricaneflora's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Terminal illness, Medical content, Injury/Injury detail, Abandonment, Suicide, Panic attacks/disorders, Medical trauma, Chronic illness, and Ableism
More...