-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
by Atul Gawande
Book Reviewed by:The New York Times bestselling author of Complications examines, in riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, how success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession
The struggle to perform well is universal: each one of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. In his new book, Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable.
Gawande’s gripping stories of diligence, ingenuity, and what it means to do right by people take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, to labor and delivery rooms in Boston, to a polio outbreak in India, and to malpractice courtrooms around the country. He discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors’ participation in lethal injections, examines the influence of money on modern medicine, and recounts the astoundingly contentious history of hand washing. And as in all his writing, Gawande gives us an inside look at his own life as a practicing surgeon, offering a searingly honest firsthand account of work in a field where mistakes are both unavoidable and unthinkable.
At once unflinching and compassionate, Better is an exhilarating journey narrated by “arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around” (Salon). Gawande’s investigation into medical professionals and how they progress from merely good to great provides rare insight into the elements of success, illuminating every area of human endeavor.
Better offers inspiration to any of us who are tempted to settle for average...continued
Full Review
(485 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Atul Gawande, a 2006 MacArthur
fellow, is a general surgeon at the
Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston,
a staff writer for The New Yorker,
an assistant professor at Harvard
Medical School, and a frequent
contributor to The New England
Journal of Medicine. He lives with
his wife and three children in Newton,
Massachusetts.
Both his parents were physicians — his
father a urologist and his mother a
pediatrician — and initially he resisted
following in their footsteps and instead
wanted to be a musician: "I wanted to be
a rock star. I played ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Better, try these:
by Elisabeth Rosenthal
Published 2018
Award-winning New York Times reporter Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal reveals the dangerous, expensive, and dysfunctional American healthcare system, and tells us exactly what we can do to solve its myriad of problems.
by Catherine Carver
Published 2017
Immune explores the incredible arsenal that lives within us - how it knows what to attack and what to defend, and how it kills everything from the common cold to the plague bacterium.
