Summary Of Five Days At Memorial By Sheri Fink

Fink’s Rhetorical Strategies: Facilitating the Consideration of Several Perspectives In Five Days at Memorial, Sheri Fink strikes a convincing balance between persuasion and objectivity. The events that took place during Hurricane Katrina continue to be scrutinized, and this book investigates the potentially unethical decisions made by people in authority. Doctors and nurses were forced to work long hours while suffering from severe emotional trauma, a fact that Fink does not discount in her assessment of their decision-making processes. Fink carefully dissects the events that took place in the Memorial Medical Centre throughout five days of Hurricane Katrina, and she uses many rhetorical strategies to strengthen her writing. She is able to

She confronts the fact that the doctors and nurses who were treating ill patients, were themselves suffering both emotionally and physically. Having just experienced the trauma that was bestowed by Hurricane Katrina, these caretakers suddenly found themselves working around the clock to treat others. They did all of this without having the necessary time to mentally recover, which proved that they were simply unable to perform at the highest level.“Lamm’s rationing directive rankled for many reasons” (Fink, 47). Not only professionally, but it is also well established that experiencing a trauma has detrimental effects on general human psychology, “The stress of the disaster narrowed people’s fields of vision, as if they wore blinders to anyone’s experience but their own” (Fink, 151). Fink neither discounts this information, nor does she believe it is enough to acquit the caretakers of their potential crimes. She simply portrays the information as an additional factor to consider in retrospect. Human psychology is a fascinating and very relevant strategy that Fink deployed in her writing, and it provides the reader with an important insight into the high-pressure environment that burdened the caretakers’ ability to make rational

As an award-winning journalist, she is certainly upheld to the highest standard of reporting, and she proves her competence through the extensive nature of her investigation. The overlying theme that encompasses her approach is her ability to view situations from multiple angles. This strategy applied to the investigation directly, because she consistently considered the opinions of many different people in regards to the same issue. This was a very effective approach because when only considering one person’s point of view, it is inevitable that their vested interests would affect the accuracy of the information. Accounting for this fact, Fink considers opinions of a variety of people, which allows her to come to the most balanced and reflective conclusions. Her ability to view situations from multiple angles also applies to the structural approach she applies to her writing. When viewing the events and their repercussions during the five days at Memorial, she does an excellent job of switching between the detailed, fact-based analysis and the big picture, theme-based analysis. To understand the full complexity of this case, Fink occasionally makes the reader take a step back from the detailed timeline, and she facilitates the consideration of a broader perspective. Her ability to guide the reader’s thought patterns is extremely effective, and this concept is also