Early reviews of Taking Up Life in Both Hands
Taking Up Life in Both Hands is a sharp, crowded political satire that drops readers into the overlapping worlds of Big Law, Catholic health care, presidential politics, and corporate medicine. Its central pair makes the novel work: Claire Flanagan, an ambitious young health lawyer trying to survive a morally slippery law firm, and Sister Ursula, a cigar-smoking nun determined to protect the charitable mission of the enormous hospital system she helped build. Their relationship develops from an awkward professional assignment into a genuine alliance, giving the story an emotional center beneath all the schemes, kickbacks, campaign maneuvering, and executive backstabbing.
Tim Greaney writes with the confidence of someone who knows these institutions from the inside. The legal and healthcare details feel specific without turning the novel into a textbook, and the book is especially good at showing how respectable language can disguise ugly behavior. Executives talk about innovation and restructuring when they mean profit and control. Lawyers talk about loyalty when they mean obedience. Politicians wrap raw ambition in patriotism, religion, or public service. Greaney keeps translating that polished language back into plain English, usually through Claire’s skeptical observations or Sister Ursula’s blunt refusal to tolerate nonsense.
The closest comparison is probably Carl Hiaasen, especially novels such as Sick Puppy or Strip Tease. Like Hiaasen, Greaney builds comedy from institutions that have become so corrupt and self-important that they barely need exaggeration. His cast also includes the sort of schemers, opportunists, damaged idealists, and cheerful eccentrics who’d fit comfortably into a Hiaasen plot. Greaney’s humor is more rooted in legal procedure and healthcare policy, though, and his satire spends more time explaining how the machinery works. That gives the book a heavier factual texture, but it also makes the misconduct feel plausible rather than merely cartoonish.
The novel’s greatest strength is the way its comedy and moral seriousness reinforce each other. Claire’s gradual decision to risk her career, Sister Ursula’s insistence that health care should still involve caring, and the eventual exposure of Brian Shea’s schemes give the sprawling plot a satisfying direction. The final chapters bring consequences, personal renewal, and a touching farewell without losing the book’s irreverent voice. Taking Up Life in Both Hands is an energetic institutional comedy about conscience under pressure, and its best moments come when two very different women recognize that professionalism means more than protecting the people who sign the checks.
Taking Up Life in Both Hands is a sharp, crowded political satire that drops readers into the overlapping worlds of Big Law, Catholic health care, presidential politics, and corporate medicine. Its central pair makes the novel work: Claire Flanagan, an ambitious young health lawyer trying to survive a morally slippery law firm, and Sister Ursula, a cigar-smoking nun determined to protect the charitable mission of the enormous hospital system she helped build. Their relationship develops from an awkward professional assignment into a genuine alliance, giving the story an emotional center beneath all the schemes, kickbacks, campaign maneuvering, and executive backstabbing.
Tim Greaney writes with the confidence of someone who knows these institutions from the inside. The legal and healthcare details feel specific without turning the novel into a textbook, and the book is especially good at showing how respectable language can disguise ugly behavior. Executives talk about innovation and restructuring when they mean profit and control. Lawyers talk about loyalty when they mean obedience. Politicians wrap raw ambition in patriotism, religion, or public service. Greaney keeps translating that polished language back into plain English, usually through Claire’s skeptical observations or Sister Ursula’s blunt refusal to tolerate nonsense.
The closest comparison is probably Carl Hiaasen, especially novels such as Sick Puppy or Strip Tease. Like Hiaasen, Greaney builds comedy from institutions that have become so corrupt and self-important that they barely need exaggeration. His cast also includes the sort of schemers, opportunists, damaged idealists, and cheerful eccentrics who’d fit comfortably into a Hiaasen plot. Greaney’s humor is more rooted in legal procedure and healthcare policy, though, and his satire spends more time explaining how the machinery works. That gives the book a heavier factual texture, but it also makes the misconduct feel plausible rather than merely cartoonish.
The novel’s greatest strength is the way its comedy and moral seriousness reinforce each other. Claire’s gradual decision to risk her career, Sister Ursula’s insistence that health care should still involve caring, and the eventual exposure of Brian Shea’s schemes give the sprawling plot a satisfying direction. The final chapters bring consequences, personal renewal, and a touching farewell without losing the book’s irreverent voice. Taking Up Life in Both Hands is an energetic institutional comedy about conscience under pressure, and its best moments come when two very different women recognize that professionalism means more than protecting the people who sign the checks.
Rating: 4
Thomas Anderson
Editor In Chief
Greaney’s sardonic wit pits idealistic heroes in a struggle against thegreedy and hypocritical healthcare industry. . . . An amusing and educational antidote to our current era, where headlines often seem like satire or farce.
—Michael Wolff , former Chief Justice of the
Missouri Supreme Court and dean emeritus,
Saint Louis University School of Law
Taking Up Life in Both Hands, by Tim Greaney, is a hysterical look at the worlds of politics, health care and the law. While the book is cynical and funny, it also has an upbeat message following the adventures of Sister Ursula, the heart and soul of the Immaculate Health System, and Claire Flannagan, a young associate in the law firm of Shea, O’Brian and Roth. Together, the two women navigate the corrupt worlds of health care and elections. Be forwarded—this is not a story of the world as it should be. Instead it is a realistic story ripped from today’s headlines which will have you crying at the state of the world while holding your sides with laughter. Greaney, a legal scholar, introduces important health care concepts in a clear, concise manner that makes them easy to understand. The reader is drawn into political and legal situations in this rip-roaring story. Unfortunately it all ends too soon. I hope that Tim has another sequel in mind.
—Rick Spees, award-winning author of Capitol Gains and Capitol Losses.
In Taking Life Up In Both Hands, law professor and former federal prosecutor Tim Greaney has deftly recast his extensive knowledge of our health care system into a rollicking, politically up-to-the-minute satire involving an earnest young associate, a savvy nun, and a motley crew of sometimes questionable characters. From the Archdiocese of New Jersey to the streets of New Orleans, Greaney’s tale of legal shenanigans is a page turner full of pluck and wit.
—Elisabeth Hyde, author of
Crazy As Chocolate,
The Abortionist’s Daughter, and
Go Ask Fannie
Tim Greaney has written an ambitious legal-political novel that moves comfortably inside the worlds of law, healthcare, religion, and power, with a level of institutional detail that feels earned rather than manufactured. A book with a strong command of professional settings—law firms, hospital systems, and public institutions, all rendered with a realism that gives the narrative unusual credibility. Greaney’s prose is direct and intelligent, allowing the novel’s themes of ambition, conscience, and institutional conflict to emerge without strain.
—Curt Varone, attorney and author, The Judgment Line