Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care

Product Information

Convenience” and “availability” become the mantras; GP surgeries, open seven days a week, are now a “service industry”. Although I felt the book lagged in places, I found the ethical considerations throughout thought-provoking, and Bunting’s humanising depiction of carers and recipients delicately handled. The fact that books like this are relatively under-exposed relative to obvious comparators (see the huge numbers of books by surgeons, therapists etc) tells its own story in that respect. However, apart from the briefest mention, disappointingly Bunting has little to say about the ambivalence and conflicts of caring, a topic many feminists have tackled well.

I most valued the general information in Bunting’s introduction and in between her interviews, while I found that the bulk of the book alternated between dry statistics and page after page of interview transcripts. Separating out hands-on care from the caring infrastructures necessary to enable it, including more indirect but interlinked sustaining practices, Bunting does not expand on the forms of community building, or radical municipalism, which are essential for repairing care. Within the current climate the book provides an answer to those questioning how we reached this point and what political and cultural shifts are required to repair our starved care systems.

She shows that care relies simultaneously on expertise and matriculated skills, and on tacit knowledge, the power of touch and wordless reassurance. Yet “elder care” remains a source of rich pickings in the private sector, apparently recession-proof, especially for overseas investors.

The final chapter maps some of the technological innovations that can impact on care which are incredible.It’s a creative, nurturing approach that stands in contrast to Britain’s emaciated care system, according to Bunting’s book. Bunting notes that many professionals she interviewed came from strongly religious backgrounds, even if they themselves were non-believers. Short sections between chapters on the history of individual keywords – care, empathy, kindness, compassion, pity, dependence, suffering – offer food for thought.

Bunting condemns the political dimensions of needlessly imposed austerity policies, with their disastrous outcomes for care.The author of 'The Queen of Whale Key' and 'The Suspicions of Mr Whicher' has found a new subject with which to amaze us: the case of the 'Croydon Poltergeist' and its investigation by the N.