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megfitz 's review for:
Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
by Rachel Clarke
“I never wanted Red Arrows, medals or minutes of silence. Like my colleagues, my needs were more prosaic. Really, I just wanted honesty from those who rule us, sufficient Covid testing and fit-for-purpose PPE. The irony, after all, could not have been lost on Boris Johnson that the one thing Hollywood scriptwriters reliably award their superheroes is, at least, a mask and a cape?”
Let me just caveat this review by saying I’m not going to ‘recommend’ this book per se. It’s too raw and has too much potential to be very triggering, but it is incredibly, incredibly moving. And it is hard to articulate its importance in a review. I will, however, say that her book ‘Your Life In My Hands’ should be compulsory reading for everyone who’s ever used the NHS (and although it is still devastatingly relevant, it doesn’t feel so as much like it is picking at wounds that haven’t quite healed, if you get what I’m saying).
If I had to describe it in one word, I would probably say ‘tender’. It’s a poignant and achingly loving memoir of NHS staff, patients, and family members, in the midst of a pandemic. Rachel Clarke knows how to use words perfectly - as she says, ‘When drugs run dry, when cure is no longer an option, I deal in words like my patients’ lives depend on it’. She oscillates between literary intimacy and journalistic detachment: at once personal and political, despairingly angry and profoundly grateful. It captures the turmoil of a workforce so selflessly dedicated to saving lives yet so drastically under-funded and under-equipped; what it means to hold onto hope even in the absence of all evidence to the contrary; and, tremendously, the impact of a few minuscule acts of kindness. No matter who you are and how you have been impacted by the pandemic, I feel like this book understands. It gives new meaning to the phrase ‘touching’, despite covid’s best efforts to take this from us.
Let me just caveat this review by saying I’m not going to ‘recommend’ this book per se. It’s too raw and has too much potential to be very triggering, but it is incredibly, incredibly moving. And it is hard to articulate its importance in a review. I will, however, say that her book ‘Your Life In My Hands’ should be compulsory reading for everyone who’s ever used the NHS (and although it is still devastatingly relevant, it doesn’t feel so as much like it is picking at wounds that haven’t quite healed, if you get what I’m saying).
If I had to describe it in one word, I would probably say ‘tender’. It’s a poignant and achingly loving memoir of NHS staff, patients, and family members, in the midst of a pandemic. Rachel Clarke knows how to use words perfectly - as she says, ‘When drugs run dry, when cure is no longer an option, I deal in words like my patients’ lives depend on it’. She oscillates between literary intimacy and journalistic detachment: at once personal and political, despairingly angry and profoundly grateful. It captures the turmoil of a workforce so selflessly dedicated to saving lives yet so drastically under-funded and under-equipped; what it means to hold onto hope even in the absence of all evidence to the contrary; and, tremendously, the impact of a few minuscule acts of kindness. No matter who you are and how you have been impacted by the pandemic, I feel like this book understands. It gives new meaning to the phrase ‘touching’, despite covid’s best efforts to take this from us.