Customer Reviews

A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

While I love memoirs and creative non-fiction essays, what I don't love is the world of medicine, doctors, and nurses, so I was surprised to find myself unable to stop reading Jennifer Culkin's first book. I read it in 2 days and it was one of my favorite reads of the year.

What I loved about it was the author's honesty and ability to weave her life as a flight nurse in with stories of her childhood and her family life. She speaks to the difficulty of caring for elderly parents (in this case, two who feel they are doing quite well on their own), the family struggles with siblings, and she does it with honestly, not trying to hide that everything is less than perfect, she makes no excuses for herself, but speaks to the reader as a friend--this is how it was.

And throughout the book, there is the author's wit. While the book does deal with difficult subjects, she is able to guide the reader through her book with her incredible forward-moving narrative as well as her ability to see the humor in unfunny situations.

The book is moving, dark, funny, honest, and gives the reader the inside scoop on what life is like for a flight nurse. I know how many times I've seen the medic helicopters go by my house with no idea what these people do and how they do it. It's an interesting look into a side of the medical world that isn't included on Grey's Anatomy or really, anywhere. And while I am not someone who reads medical memoirs, I connected with this one in many ways. And as I said, I couldn't put it down and I was interested in Culkin's thoughts and stories.

What a treat to have such a strong new voice in the creative non-fiction/memoir world. I can now only hope I don't have too long to wait until her next book.

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.

I read this book in less than 2 days. I don't know the author but work with flight nurses on a daily basis.

Every chapter has a different feel. Some are extremely personal about dealing with her parents, her siblings, feelings about her children and parenting and especially touching is the one about her struggles with multiple sclerosis. Other terrific chapters trace why and how her parents came to their own, very different, conclusions about end-of-life issues.

As a health care provider as well, I especially appreciated her insights about how people who work with critically ill patients have quite different approach to dealing with illness when people we love get sick.

Chapters on aging parents should be required reading for anyone over 60!

Finally, her writing style is lovely -- I re-read multiple sentences just because they were so thoughtful.

I loved this book and hated for it to end. Every nurse can relate to Jennifer's experiences as she recounts them in such a wonderful writing style. I hope that she will tell us more soon, great job for a first book.

As someone who has experienced life similarities, minus the diagnosis of MS, I find Ms. Culkin's memoir eerily accurate in facts, feelings, and experiences. She clearly vasillates between the searing emotion of her own dying parents, (as the only child with medical knowledge) and the connections made with parents of dying children. The flight team memories touched my heart. Please keep writing.

I was expecting this book to be exciting and full of heroic life saving efforts that the author encountered in her career but easily 2/3 of the book is about her family. I honestly do not know that this book can be called a memoir of critical care. It is more of a memoir of her family with bits and pieces of critical care thrown in. I found myself turning page after page without having read them just to get to the "meat" of what I thought this book was going to be about. It seems like the few trauma stories that actually managed to make it into the book all end in a fatality. While I know that this happens in real life, it would be nice to hear about some of the patients that defied all odds and did manage to overcome their adversity. And as someone else posted, I must agree that the book was quite disjointed. While some authors can pull off this suspense enducing tactic, Culkin is not one of them. It was almost as if her thoughts dropped off and several times I found myself wondering if I was going to find out what happened next or if it would be forgotten. Ms. Caulkin had the chance to tell an amazing story about the most severe of critical care situations, something that most people could never even imagine much less in a means that even fewer people will ever have the chance to experience. Unfortunately, all that precious page space was spent writing about her family. I bought the book because it appeared to have a unique slant that I had not seen before: a critical care flight nurse. What I read was a typical boring book about an everday family with run of the mill problems....nothing worth spending $10 for.

Jennifer Culkin became a flight nurse in Washington State after experience in many critical care settings elsewhere. Being a flight nurse requires one to have a substantial fund of knowledge and to be able to think quickly to use that knowledge to save patients who are often being taken from smaller hospitals to a larger facility for necessary specialty care.

First of all, let me say, Jennifer Culkin is a wonderful writer who can tell a compelling story. She puts the reader in midst of the action and has them turning pages at a feverish pace in places. However I had expected more stories of her experiences as a flight nurse than the few instances she relates. Instead we have a memoir that incorporates more of her life and after a very exciting beginning story of an emergency flight, which makes the readers want more, we only get a few examples here and there. And instead she tells a lot of the accidents involving the rescue helicopters while performing their perilous flights many times in inclement weather, end up crashing into the cold waters of Puget Sound, several involving her co-workers.

That said, the stories particularly interested this reviewer being a former resident of the island where the author lives (she never identifies the island but it wasn't difficult to figure out it is Bainbridge Island) and an employee of a small rural hospital often needing helicopter services (which seems to be described several times as a small hospital on the Olympic Peninsula). Readers who are looking for page after page of flight nurse emergency experiences won't find it here, but as I said her story is compelling nevertheless. I would usually give something like this three stars, but with the familiar subject matter and her wonderful writing, I have to give it more like four stars. The fact that I was disappointed at not reading more of Culkin's emergency flight experiences keeps it from being a five-star read.

A few years back I read the book "Trauma Junkie: Memoirs of an Emergency Flight Nurse" and enjoyed it. The back cover of this book promised something similar, a book about the stories of a flight nurse. Instead its more a book about her family with the occasional nursing story thrown in. And I should add that its written in somewhat of a "literary" style with polished sentences, carefully chosen adjectives, and all the other hallmarks of someone who's spent a lot of time taking writing classes. A little too burnished writing style for me, but your tastes may differ.

So if you're looking for a book about flight nurses, get "Trauma Junkie". If you want to read a glossy memoir from a writer who happened to be in the nursing line of business, this is the book for you.