Book Announcement: First Aid and CPR

Title: First Aid and CPR

Author: National Safety Council

Date: 1993

Publisher: Jones & Bartlett

ISBN: 0-86720-792-2

Length: 92 pages

Illustrations: full-color photos and drawings

Quote: “More than 140,000 Americans die every year from injuries, and one in three suffers a nonfatal injury, so it is likely that at some time in your life you will encounter an emergency requiring first aid.”

First Aid and CPR is not really a book to “review.” It's a book to announce. It's a textbook and reference book. I have it. You might need a copy, too. If so, you may buy it through this web site.

Well, that's not a lot of information to give readers about a book...Right. Baby-boomers were taught, as children, how to pack a first-aid kit and give first aid for the kind of emergencies half-grown Boy or Girl Scouts can safely treat—mostly “owies.” We learned how to clean and dress skin wounds, how to remove bee stings, how to try to reach someone with a pole before going into deep water to rescue the person, and so on. First Aid and CPR is a book for grown-ups. It picks up where the Scout Manuals left off, with a line or two about ticks and blisters after the discussions of the Heimlich Maneuver and Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation. Which come after the discussions of legal liability.

Actually teenagers should be able to understand this book, too, especially if they use it in training classes with adults. Teenagers may even appreciate the presupposition that they already know how to “treat” a skinned knee.

In any case, this book is for readers who can take words like “anaphylactic” and “hemorrhagic” in stride; the authors define the difference between those types of shock and move briskly on with the discussion of how to treat each one.

If you learned the information that was in the Scout Manual thoroughly, you particularly need this book. When was your Scout Manual printed? The one I studied most assiduously came out in 1963. What I learned from it was solid and valid in 2003, but ready for an update. Lots of new information and techniques had become available in those forty years. If you, too, have been relying on what you learned in 1963, why not treat yourself to the updates.

This one is not a Fair Trade Book because it was written by a committee, and because its "web enhancements" aren't guaranteed. It's still $5 per copy plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment, but it's thin enough that you could get a dozen books of this size into one package, which may make this price more competitive. I still have multiple copies (after having sold some) in real life, too, and in real life they don't cost $5 per copy.