Julie Salamon

Julie Salamon has written a series of award-winning books, including "Facing the Wind" (2001), "The Net of Dreams" (1996), and "Rambam’s Ladder" (2003). "The Devil’s Candy" (1991) is considered a Hollywood classic about film making gone awry, and her novella, "The Christmas Tree", (1996) was a "New York Times" best-seller and has been translated into eight languages. She was a reporter and the film critic for The "Wall Street Journal" for many years, and then a culture writer on the staff of the "New York Times". Her journalism has appeared in "The New Yorker", "Vanity Fair", "Vogue", "Bazaar", and "The New Republic". She has been an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. For Hospital she was chosen to be a Kaiser Media Fellow for 2006-2007.

Salamon is a graduate of Tufts University and New York University School of Law. She is chair of the BRC, a social services organization in New York City that provides care for people who are homeless and may suffer from addiction or mental disease. Born in Cincinnati and raised in Seaman, Ohio, a rural town of 800, she lives in downtown Manhattan with her husband and two children, two cats and a puppy.

Hospital

Julie Salamon's most recent work, "Hospital" was published on May 15, 2008 and is excrpted here:

"The hospital in Borough Park did not fit Gregorius’s blithe vision of work hard, play hard. His memories of his first foray into the Maimonides emergency room were vague: Crowded. Really crowded. Stretchers with patients were lined up two-and three-deep, with the lucky ones semi-secluded behind curtains that barely closed. He noticed that the melting-pot-mayhem--Hasids, Chinese, Pakistanis, Haitians, Russians, Bulgarians—did not seem to include anybody like him, a tall, skinny, white surfer-ski-boy from the Midwest. The visual overload was matched by the audio: Tower of Babel at top volume, accompanied by the constant beeping of monitors, pagers, telephones. The usual E.R. smells of antiseptic and bodily stink, but also strange spicy odors he couldn’t place.

Had he landed in the Third World, or a developing nation, whatever the correct terminology of the moment was? Before he could panic, he came across evidence that he was, indeed, firmly situated in the First World, 21st century: Maimonides had HealthmaticsED, a very cool, very tomorrow, computer system that, among other things, allowed doctors and nurses to track on a patient in real time. The computer monitors were stationed like beacons of sanity throughout the room. For Gregorius, they made the chaos seem almost comprehensible.Overcrowding had become commonplace in American emergency rooms which had, for people without medical insurance, become the doctor’s office. In June, 2006, almost a year after Gregorius began his residency, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies would publish a report that warned: “A national crisis in emergency care has been brewing and is now beginning to come into full view.” The emergency department at Maimonides, which would process more than 84,000 patients in Gregorius’s first year, was not the busiest E.R. in the country or in New York City. But it was arguably the most intense.

Maimonides—make that Brooklyn, early 21st century—was an epicenter of the cultural forces that had been rocking and roiling the American experiment for a generation. The hospital, by necessity and tradition, remained a DMZ zone, where patients dragged in not just their wounds, fevers and malfunctions, but their accents and customs, their immigration and insurance problems, their feelings about being outsiders. Hope and heart-ache in 67 languages. Sick and scared, they yearned for kindness and prayed for competence from the doctors, nurses, floor cleaners, lab technicians, paper pushers and social workers, who had their own troubles, and were often newcomers themselves. At Maimonides, cross-cultural forces made for one big surf tide." [ [http://www.juliesalamon.com/hospital_reviews.html Hospital reviews] ]

Public Speaking and Appearances

She has spoken to large and small philanthropic and community organizations in at least 20 states across the country, from Maine to California, Texas to Michigan. She has been the keynote speaker for numerous conferences, often to audiences of several thousand people. A sampling of these organizations: the Ivy League MIT and Stanford Conference for Corporate and Foundation Relation fundraisers, the national convention of Boys and Girls Clubs of America, The Metro Health Foundation in Cleveland, Winston-Salem Foundation, Marin Community Foundation, dozens of UJA groups as well as churches, synagogues, libraries, universities and lower schools.

References

External links

* [http://www.juliesalamon.com Julie Salamon's Offical Website]
* [http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=Julie+Salamon&d=&o=&v=&c=&n=10&dp=0&daterange=full&sort=newest Julie Salamon's Articles for the New York Times]
* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0DE6DB1039F931A15756C0A960958260 May 22, 1996