YSN Reading List from Yale Nursing Faculty

Please enjoy these reading recommendations from Yale School of Nursing faculty.

Elizabeth A. Doyle, ’95 DNP, APRN, PNP-BC, BC-ADM, CDE
Assistant Professor , Pediatric Nurse Practioner specialty
The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity by Dr. Nadine Burke

I really was moved by the book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity. It was recommended to me by one of our recent graduates.  In fact, I am trying to figure out how to incorporate it into my class for final-year PNPs.  Dr. Burke describes the physiological and psychological effects, both short- and long-term, of ACES (adverse childhood experiences).  While it is difficult to read about these experiences and their impact on health, she also leaves you with hope that as health care providers we can do something about it —first and foremost that we should be assessing for these in all our patients, but also provides suggestions on how we, as holistic health care providers, might help buffer the effects.

Dena Schulman-Green, PhD
Research Scientist in Nursing
Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

From Atul Gawande, a book that has the potential to change medicine — and lives:

“Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.

Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them. And families go along with all of it.

In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures — in his own practices as well as others’ — as life draws to a close. And he discovers how we can do better. He follows a hospice nurse on her rounds, a geriatrician in his clinic, and reformers turning nursing homes upside down. He finds people who show us how to have the hard conversations and how to ensure we never sacrifice what people really care about.

Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal shows that the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life — all the way to the very end.”

Judy Kunisch, MBA, BSN, RN
Lecturer in Nursing
Caring Matters Most by Mark Lazenby

By far one of the best books written for and about nurses and for the public.  Everyone can learn from reading this book because it is just what the title says, it is about caring. 

Lisa Summers, ’83, DrPH, FACNM
Lecturer in Nursing 
Eunice: The Kennedy Who Changed the World by Eileen McNamara

As a high school student, I volunteered as a Special Olympics coach and was profoundly moved by Eunice’s presence at the games, so those aspects of the biography were particularly enjoyable.

Hard for me to do better than this from the publisher:

Granted access to never-before-seen private papers—from the scrapbooks Eunice kept as a schoolgirl in prewar London to her thoughts on motherhood and feminism—McNamara paints a vivid portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and out of step with it: the visionary founder of the Special Olympics, a devout Catholic in a secular age, and a formidable woman whose impact on American society was longer lasting than that of any of the Kennedy men.

David Vlahov, PhD, RN, FAAN
Associate Dean for Research, PhD Program Director
Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal

The US in Iraq and Afghanistan was constantly behind the eight ball with the insurgency because US forces had not experienced this kind of warfare before. What McChrystal did was to coordinate the assets that had been siloed. Part of the organizational strategy was to have representatives from one group embedded in others so that there were personal relationships, nimble communications, and focused coordination across groups.  The book has relevance to health care and academic nursing, where health care is more complex in terms of accountable care, yet we do not see optimal utilization and coordination of workforce, services, and research.  A quick read.

Robin Whittemore, PhD, APRN, FAAN
Professor of Nursing
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

A strong endorsement from the dust jacket:

“To read this magnificent biography of Leonardo da Vinci is to take a tour through the life and works of one of the most extraordinary human beings of all time in the company of the most engaging, informed, and insightful guide imaginable. Walter Isaacson is at once a true scholar and spellbinding writer. And what a wealth of lessons there are to be learned in these pages.” – David McCullough