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Weekends At Bellevue: Nine Years On The Night Shift At The Psych E.R. (2009)

by Julie Holland(Favorite Author)

3.39 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0553807668 (ISBN13: 9780553807660)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Bantam

review 1: This book doesn't really seem to be about the hospital at all. Sure there are some stories thrown in about patients that she has seen during her time there but there were huge chunks that were about what was going on in her life during that time. I was interested in the history of the place and maybe learn about the different illness that they see in the psych ER but we never really got any of that. The stories that she did share though seemed that she was more worried about prescribing meds to get them out the door. She even tells us that she sometimes will position a patient so their back is to the tv so if what they are telling her bores her she can watch SNL. How very uncaring and unprofessional! We also told multiple times that she has slept with a lot of the workers ... morethere during her weekend shifts. There is a good use of your time. I would hate to know how more often that would have happened if she worked a 40 hour work week. I really don't see WHY those tidbits were added into the book. It made her really unlikable. I was also annoyed that she mentions numerous times that she had to be butch or macho or "man" enough to play with the big boys ie the police. SERIOUSLY?!?!?! You are an intelligent well educated Female doctor. You don't have to be 'man' enough to do anything or prove that to anyone. Sometimes this need makes her do things that are against protocol or could have gotten her hurt. Men are not above women - there is NO need to prove anything. There were other things like telling a patient he was getting one drug but instead being given something else, telling patients straight up that she thinks there lying, and angering a patient on so much that they punched her in the face. I could go on. Granted, after finishing this book, I did search out the documentary that she mentions a few times during the book, on you tube and watched it. The job isn't that easy and having to deal with people like that on a daily basis would wear anyone down. Maybe the way she came across in her book isn't how she actually was, but that is the thing with written word. It is easy to misinterpret someones intentions because you can't physically see them at their job and how they interact with others.
review 2: It's not really very well written. The author uses a lot of really backwards language and the book is hampered by her narcissism and her longwindedness. There are parts of this book where she gets too repetitive and just basically babbles for a while. Was there an editor on this book? This could have been a much better book if the author had been less concerned with herself and more concerned with the patients in the hospital. And I'd have enjoyed it more if she were more probing in her stories and less concerned with appealing to some imaginary mob hungry for lurid, superficial storytelling. But, it wasn't all terrible. There were stretches where I was on her side. less

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