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A Final Arc of Sky: A Memoir of Critical Care
A critical care and emergency flight nurse, Jennifer Culkin is no stranger to death and its dramas, or the urgency that accompanies them. Her memoir plunges us into the chaos of emergency medicine at all altitudes, masterfully reflecting on the most pivotal moments of our lives and the beautiful fragility of our mortality.
248 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
October 6, 2009
Really 3.5 stars.
I was a little disappointed in this book. I was expecting more about being a flight nurse--exploring the patients, the shifts, the kind of people that do this work, the crazy ups, downs, and intense boredom between bouts of intensity.
Instead, even the exciting parts aren't that exciting. Somehow she makes this job seem like any other humdrum job. Descriptions of insane trips don't feel crazy. Things that had to have been funny (and she talks about laughing) don't read funny.
I wasn't expecting so much of the book to be about her parents' declining health and her family relationships.
Not bad writing, just not my kind and not what I was expecting at all.
Meh.
I was a little disappointed in this book. I was expecting more about being a flight nurse--exploring the patients, the shifts, the kind of people that do this work, the crazy ups, downs, and intense boredom between bouts of intensity.
Instead, even the exciting parts aren't that exciting. Somehow she makes this job seem like any other humdrum job. Descriptions of insane trips don't feel crazy. Things that had to have been funny (and she talks about laughing) don't read funny.
I wasn't expecting so much of the book to be about her parents' declining health and her family relationships.
Not bad writing, just not my kind and not what I was expecting at all.
Meh.
Want to read
December 10, 2009SA: "An eloquent and compelling memoir by a critical care flight nurse, that soars with tragedy and tenderness. A sense of fragility, and well as resiliency and strength, permeate Culkin's life and calling."
April 2, 2010
Working in the medical field desensitizes you to a lot of things. To deal with the trauma that a flight team sees every day, you must have to develop quite the thick hide. However, I just cannot reconcile that to my feelings about the same. Honestly, emotionally, I just can't hang up my hat at the end of the day and ignore what has gone on before. Human life is just too valuable and I don't care how many dissection classes you've had and what you've seen the body reduced to...there are things beyond the clinical. So, the superior attitude and sterility of the author depress and anger me.
May 20, 2009
I really loved these slice of life essays that overall turned into a memoir of not just the authors experience as a flight nurse, but about the fragility of life, hers and all of ours. Thankfully she doesn't take it lying down but approaches each tragedy with spirit and fight.
September 26, 2009
This book is a contemporary memoir of a critical care and emergency flight nurse who flew in helicopters in this area. It intertwines the lives and deaths and births of strangers with lives and deaths and births in her own life over a period of years. I devoured it. It was great.
October 4, 2009
Perhaps the best memoir on nursing I have ever read. Everything feels as if you are there in each moment. The reader can feel all of the humor, horror, poiniency, love exhaustion, exhilaration to be found in Nursing. Exciting, hilarious and heartwrenching. Read it soon!
May 27, 2009
I identified so well with some of her stories it was scary...
June 13, 2009
Well written from a new author. Timely for me since I was carted by ambulance this week. I was broadsided that she wrote about having MS.
July 31, 2017
Great book
I appreciated the discussion of a high risk area of nursing and how health care professionals adapt to it. The author also wove into this discussion how she copied with family, personal and professional crisis.
I appreciated the discussion of a high risk area of nursing and how health care professionals adapt to it. The author also wove into this discussion how she copied with family, personal and professional crisis.
March 8, 2021
Interesting, I learned a lot.
March 19, 2017
I loved this book. It perhaps would have held together better if she had focused on either her personal history or her experiences as a medevac nurse. It was a bit scattered. But her writing is beautiful. I hope she writes more. Loved the local tie-in too.
January 29, 2014
Here we have a memoir of life and death issues from several different altitudes. Jennifer Culkin may once have been a flight RN, but she is now a writer, an author of one of the more memorable and deftly told tales of Air Medical aviation I’m familiar with. Full disclosure: this reviewer spent twenty years in the cockpit of an Air Med helicopter, and I, too, am now a writer, so my biases apply in both directions, up and down. Culkin’s prose is exquisite, her analogies, similes and metaphors are perfect throughout this book, and with her wry sense of humor and irreverent attitude toward emergency patients and trauma in general she took me back to the jump-through-your-ass world of emergency pre-hospital medicine that I once loved.
In addition, woven throughout the book are references to her parents and their diminishing quality of life as seen from the viewpoint of the medically-astute daughter. Culkin also outlines her own struggle with the onset of MS and how it curtails her working life, a medical issue that ended her flying career, much the same as my own medical issue ended mine, another similarity. Indeed, much of the work describes the author’s interaction with family members and the deaths of her parents.
A few reviewers have taken the author to task about this seeming diversion in the story. For me, it cuts to the heart of what emergency medical personnel are about, the unflinching need for truth and an almost cold-hearted realism in dealing with end of life issues. This trait is a common one among those who toil in the vineyard of emergency medicine, and it extends to family as well, as if they (we) never quite go off duty, never really hang up the pager and relax. Culkin would have been negligent to ignore her own parents’ slide to eternity. She hints at a need for a more clear-eyed discussion of these things, our obsession with prolonging life without deciding what ‘life’ really means running as subtext in the book. More often than the public might think, the underlying question in emergency medicine is not how quickly to respond, but whether to respond at all. If my experience as a pilot matches Culkin’s as a flight nurse, and I suspect that it does, refusal to answer that burning question drives much of the current health care debate.
As for the book's shortcomings, as a former Air Med pilot, I would like to have seen more commentary from her, especially since she’s left flight nursing, on the causes and prevention of fatal Air Med accidents. The industry she and I both devoted much of our lives to has taken far too many lives of colleagues we knew and loved. I wanted to hear what she had to say about that, not just a rundown of those accidents. For that, I can read an NTSB report.
Beautifully written, with elegant phrasing and intriguing connections, A Final Arc of Sky is a pleasure to read. Anyone who enjoys heartwarming human interest stories, deeply moving memoir and insightful descriptions of technically fascinating careers will love this book. Anyone who has worked in pre-hospital emergency medicine will relate to it, and love it as well.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me: A Memoir of Flying & Life
In addition, woven throughout the book are references to her parents and their diminishing quality of life as seen from the viewpoint of the medically-astute daughter. Culkin also outlines her own struggle with the onset of MS and how it curtails her working life, a medical issue that ended her flying career, much the same as my own medical issue ended mine, another similarity. Indeed, much of the work describes the author’s interaction with family members and the deaths of her parents.
A few reviewers have taken the author to task about this seeming diversion in the story. For me, it cuts to the heart of what emergency medical personnel are about, the unflinching need for truth and an almost cold-hearted realism in dealing with end of life issues. This trait is a common one among those who toil in the vineyard of emergency medicine, and it extends to family as well, as if they (we) never quite go off duty, never really hang up the pager and relax. Culkin would have been negligent to ignore her own parents’ slide to eternity. She hints at a need for a more clear-eyed discussion of these things, our obsession with prolonging life without deciding what ‘life’ really means running as subtext in the book. More often than the public might think, the underlying question in emergency medicine is not how quickly to respond, but whether to respond at all. If my experience as a pilot matches Culkin’s as a flight nurse, and I suspect that it does, refusal to answer that burning question drives much of the current health care debate.
As for the book's shortcomings, as a former Air Med pilot, I would like to have seen more commentary from her, especially since she’s left flight nursing, on the causes and prevention of fatal Air Med accidents. The industry she and I both devoted much of our lives to has taken far too many lives of colleagues we knew and loved. I wanted to hear what she had to say about that, not just a rundown of those accidents. For that, I can read an NTSB report.
Beautifully written, with elegant phrasing and intriguing connections, A Final Arc of Sky is a pleasure to read. Anyone who enjoys heartwarming human interest stories, deeply moving memoir and insightful descriptions of technically fascinating careers will love this book. Anyone who has worked in pre-hospital emergency medicine will relate to it, and love it as well.
Byron Edgington, author of The Sky Behind Me: A Memoir of Flying & Life
January 24, 2014
I loved the title and the concept. The writing is sublime and at times it is harrowing. The overall structure and execution of the book, however, fell a little short in places.
When an author comes up with a title this good, you know she can put words together. Here's an example of a passage that I really loved: "From the schoolyard, I could smell the brine lifting off the confluence of Boston Harbor and the Chelsea River, a mile or two away, working on me like an elixir. What I wanted more than anything was to cross Revere Beach, my feet burning like a firewalker's on the dry, gray sand, to wade through the muck of brown seaweed at water's edge, to fold myself inch by inch into the Atlantic." Magnificent!! It really puts me there. I wish I could remember my childhood half so vividly.
The book, structured as a series of vignettes, lacks a little bit of cohesion. I agree with the people who questioned the wisdom of devoting half the book to the story of her parents' deaths. It takes the book away from its strength, a peek into this amazing world of in-flight nursing, and turns it into just a memoir of Jennifer Culkin's life. I feel harsh and cynical for saying this, but everybody of a certain age has to deal with those issues -- it's just not *that* original a story. I'm not saying she should have written the book differently, but it did make the book more ordinary in my opinion.
However, the final chapter, where she tells the stories of the people who lost their lives in this hazardous occupation, redeems any other shortcomings the book has. It also raises a big flag in my mind. Six deaths in less than ten years, in a company that employs a few dozen people? Does OSHA know about this?
Finally, the way she writes about her multiple sclerosis is remarkable. In anybody else's autobiography, this would have been front and center. In hers, you don't even find out until the second-to-last chapter! Congratulations, Jennifer Culkin, on not letting your life be defined by your illness. I hope that it will continue to be so and I hope that they will eventually find a cure.
When an author comes up with a title this good, you know she can put words together. Here's an example of a passage that I really loved: "From the schoolyard, I could smell the brine lifting off the confluence of Boston Harbor and the Chelsea River, a mile or two away, working on me like an elixir. What I wanted more than anything was to cross Revere Beach, my feet burning like a firewalker's on the dry, gray sand, to wade through the muck of brown seaweed at water's edge, to fold myself inch by inch into the Atlantic." Magnificent!! It really puts me there. I wish I could remember my childhood half so vividly.
The book, structured as a series of vignettes, lacks a little bit of cohesion. I agree with the people who questioned the wisdom of devoting half the book to the story of her parents' deaths. It takes the book away from its strength, a peek into this amazing world of in-flight nursing, and turns it into just a memoir of Jennifer Culkin's life. I feel harsh and cynical for saying this, but everybody of a certain age has to deal with those issues -- it's just not *that* original a story. I'm not saying she should have written the book differently, but it did make the book more ordinary in my opinion.
However, the final chapter, where she tells the stories of the people who lost their lives in this hazardous occupation, redeems any other shortcomings the book has. It also raises a big flag in my mind. Six deaths in less than ten years, in a company that employs a few dozen people? Does OSHA know about this?
Finally, the way she writes about her multiple sclerosis is remarkable. In anybody else's autobiography, this would have been front and center. In hers, you don't even find out until the second-to-last chapter! Congratulations, Jennifer Culkin, on not letting your life be defined by your illness. I hope that it will continue to be so and I hope that they will eventually find a cure.
August 19, 2010
This book was surprisingly poetic. While some of the nursing details were hard to read- both hard in that life is fragile, and hard in that they're a little graphic - I found myself devouring the book anyway. Culkin does a good mix of her career and her life. Both are tumultuous. She has amazing connections with coworkers and family, and I believe much of her strength comes from this, as well as a no-nonsense attitude.
June 28, 2011
Better than splendid! And not just 'cause I know Jennifer...ultimately didn't make a difference. The delightful combination of medical black humor, which I love, and the genuine compassion that so often is--for a lot of us--simultaneous with total annoyance. It took considerable craft to weave the multitude of stories into a cohesive narrative and dramatic arc as well. So for sheer technical ability, sheer heart and chutzpah...I loved it.
February 9, 2023
I found her craft as a writer to be very skilled and in fact far more creative that I expected. Culkin had some descriptions of events with an insight that truly shocked or surprised me with her literary cleverness. I did not think that a nurse's memoir would be written with such a creative , intuitive or magical sense of time and space. I really enjoyed her descriptions and her viewpoints on life.
April 3, 2010
Great sharing of the life of a flt nurse--for medical causes-- here in the Great PNW. The author lives on Bainbridge, and tells us about her career and also her personal life. About her folks--who refused to discuss end of life issues. Fascinating.
December 19, 2012
I liked this, but wish she shared more stories from flying instead of spending so much time on personal family matters. It was very touching that she included the parts about her coworkers dying in the accidents. Makes you remember how dangerous the job can be.
July 21, 2015
I didn't enjoy this book as much as I hoped. I was looking for more patient stories and not the author's life story. It was interesting but not what I expected and hoped for. At the end, she mentioned caring for over 4000 patients but she didn't mention nearly that many.
August 7, 2010
Interesting window to flight nursing. Made the more interesting because the author is from this area. Sadly, I didn't know of her medical condition and thought that she was still practicing.
January 25, 2011
I liked the writing style, but wish it had more storiess about the nursing. I guess I'm just not much of a personal memoir type.
March 4, 2011
Culkin writes beautifully, and I particularly appreciated her discussions of caring for her elderly parents.
June 6, 2011
Bravo, Jennifer.
October 5, 2012
I loved this book! It was very interesting about the life of a flight care nurse.
November 13, 2012
AMAZING WRITING
March 12, 2013
I loved this book! Any RN's, MD's, RT's would appreciate this memoir. Jennifer put into words what I as a critical care nurse, feel everyday. Bravo!
February 6, 2015
There was a lack of direction with the narrative (kept going back and forth with events), but I appreciate the honesty and glimpse at the life of an emergency flight nurse.
January 20, 2016
For the most part I really liked this book -- it got a bit ridiculous how many times the author went back and forth - present to past on and on
Subject matter interesting
Subject matter interesting
January 27, 2016
What dedication. And a great inside look at rescue and trauma care.
Read
June 4, 2016Not a great read. Author is too self absorbed.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews