A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: medic rig, final arc, flutter valve, Final Arc of Sky, Jennifer Culkin, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Over three decades, more than 4,000 patients and their loved ones have shared their most wrenching ultimate experiences with Culkin, a critical care nurse living near Seattle. In this compelling memoir, her moving reflections on life and death interweave clinical encounters with her own life. She looks back at the clockwork of hormones as she began her relationship with her future husband while working 12-hour shifts in a San Francisco intensive-care nursery, moving on to become a traveling nurse in Anchorage, then living in the Alaskan wilderness, completely alone at the edge of the civilized universe. Her marriage, sons, problems with her parents and family dynamics intertwine with memories of patients extricated from wreckage and an impromptu procedure in a helicopter on a patient who couldn't breathe. Culkin details the sisterhood of nursing, with its risks and stress and sharing cups of 0900 coffee, and her own bouts with multiple sclerosis. Describing her life as a flight nurse in the final chapters, Culkin sees herself and others clearly, and poetic juxtapositions make her sentences soar. (Apr.)
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Review

This book gives us so much more than the details of Jennifer Culkin's experiences as an intensive care nurse; it lifts us into the world of the helicopter and into some of life's highest dramas. A Final Arc of Sky carries its "mortal freight" with candid honesty as it addresses how we choose to live our lives, and sometimes how we end them. I loved the stories, the language, the point of view, but what I loved most was the way this book was able to break my heart-then mend it.
-Judith Kitchen, author of Distance and Direction

"In this powerful, beautifully written memoir, Jennifer Culkin seems constitutionally incapable of sentimentality as a nurse and as a writer. Instead, she wields an irreverent sensibility like a scalpel and applies lyrical insights like a balm, unveiling a fierce and tender passion for her work and her family as she celebrates the "accidental sacraments" that emerge from love and loss. This compelling book displays a taut awareness of the emotions that attend those who are at the beginning of life and those nearing the end, as Culkin asks us to regard honestly and compassionately, as she has, what we must look at, and what we can't help but look away from."
-Sherry Simpson, author of The Way Winter Comes and The Accidental Explorer

"Rarely have we heard from such an eloquent yet urgent voice from the frontlines of mortality. Jennifer Culkin, a writer of enormous talents, brings us too close for comfort to a variety of intense locales: the wreckage of a highway pileup, the inside of a pediatric intensive care unit, her father's deathbed. She writes with elegiac grace and unblinking honesty of our collective determination to sustain life, limb and, above all, dignity."
-Robin Hemley, author of Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday

"A Final Arc of Sky is one of the very few books I've read that is simultaneously 'I-can't-stop-turning-pages' riveting and profoundly meditative. With her electrifying scenes, her gorgeous sentences, and her provocative explorations of the borderland between life and death, Culkin engaged my heart, my intellect, my artistic sensibility, and my adrenaline. A remarkable debut."
-Ann Pancake, author of Strange as This Weather Has Been

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807072850
• ISBN-13: 978-0807072851
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #568,734 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and compelling, April 11, 2009

By	Kathleen Wagner "~have book~will read~" (SWPA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book has only one failing as far as I am concerned. It is far too short.

The episodes related in this book range from critical care for infants in PICU units, to lifesaving measures applied while being bounced around in a helicopter. Each of the stories told by the author of her experiences on the job are mirrored by other stories about her personal life. This serves to make a very compelling read.

The style of this author is informal and down to earth. This is a style I enjoy when reading a memoir. It provides a sort of intimacy that is not to be found by a more formal approach.

I will indeed recommend this book to my friends, and I will also hope for a volume II by Jennifer Culkin.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grim but moving, April 21, 2009

By	Jamie Holcomb "jeholcomb" (Southwest Georgia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After working as a NICU and PICU nurse, Culkin becomes a flight nurse. She describes harrowing life and death scenes, scenes whose outcome is known only if it is bad. If the patient dies in the air, she knows it. If the patient recovers... well, that happens on someone else's watch. Telling her story in a thematic, rather than linear, arrangement, Culkin juxtaposes particular flights with more or less loosely related fragments of her own life: the growing up of her sons, especially the younger; her daredevil bike rides, surprising in someone who works with trauma patients; her parents' aging, illness, and descent into selfishness; her own struggle with multiple sclerosis. For me, the hardest parts of the book to read were those about her parents' final illnesses. Both become querulous, irrational, and self-centered, wanting those they love to perform backbreaking labor to care for them and refusing to accept outside help. None of the book is exactly easy to read--Culkin isn't the kind of memoir writer who carefully balances the grim with the hopeful, and there's a dark edge even to her beloved bike rides--but these sections are just plain ugly. The last chapter, in which she details some of the colleagues she's lost to helicopter crashes, had me almost in tears. Again, she starts not with the first time this happens to her, but the most recent, looping back and forth through the connections. The nonlinear format, which is sometimes disorienting in other places, works particularly well in this last chapter.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lacking flow and warmth, July 10, 2009

By	Jean Kelso "punxsygal" (Wisconsin) - See all my reviews

I sat down to read A Final Arc of Sky expecting to read about the adventures of a nurse in the unusual setting of a helicopter on "flight for life" missions. And while there were some elements of this, I found the book to be more about her family and her illness against the backdrop of her career. I longed for some flow through the stories and instead read disjointed thoughts. Ms. Culkin seemed to lack warmth in her relationships to the patients and her parents. All in all, it was a disappointing read based upon my expectations of what it might have been.