Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

Installment #3 in the Sad Book Series: Strength in What Remains tells the story of a Burundi man (Burundian?) who flees his country after brutal ethnic violence erupts and arrives in New York City with $200, no English, but plenty of smarts, persistence, half of a medical degree, and the wonderful first name of DeoGratias [...]

Larry’s Kidney by Daniel Asa Rose

Larry’s Kidney is the barely-believable and, if true, rather shocking story of how the author helped his cousin procure a black-market kidney in China. Larry is obese, diabetic, a dialysis patient, and he has never met a vegetable he would care to eat, but in the end he does get a kidney transplant from an [...]

Final Exam by Pauline Chen

What is it with physicians and their urge to write (as in here, here, here, here)?(Or perhaps what’s up with me for choosing to read so many physicians’ books?)
The author of Final Exam is a thoughtful, kind woman and if I was planning to have a liver transplant (knock on wood) I would definitely go [...]

Face to Face by Maria Siemionow

I picked up Face to Face because I thought it would be interesting to hear about what it takes to do face transplants and how patients recover from such an ordeal — and I did not quite get what I had bargained for. I did read, ad nauseam, about how smart and hard working Maria [...]

Experimental Man by David Duncan

In Experimental Man, the author, a middle-aged man in good health, submits to all manners of medical tests, noth mundane and cutting-edge, to find out what modern medicine can tell him about himself and his survival prospects. And by the end of the book he finds out that he is, indeed, in good health — [...]

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Since I recently made fun of over-the-top Indian epics I must admit that Cutting for Stone features conjoined twins, political coups, a miraculously avoided plane crash, female circumcision, death by syphilis,  death by typhoid, and that does not even include the pregnant nun from chapter 1. But Cutting for Stone works – at least for [...]

Hippocrates’ Shadow by David Newman

Hippocrates’ Shadow claims to tell us what “doctors don’t know and don’t tell us” but it does a lot more. Using both individual patients’ vignettes (that thankfully feel fresh and real) and more general analyses it makes a good case that we should cough rather than drink cough syrup, avoid antibiotics for sore throats, reconsider routine [...]

Intern by Sandeep Jauhar

Intern is a dark description of medical internships by the author, who interestingly completed a Ph.D. in Physics before embarking on that career. It’s a brutal tale of stupendously long hours, enormous responsibilities put upon very green interns, errors due to poor communications and attrocious record-keeping systems, and decisions occasionally made for egotistic rather than [...]

Better by Atul Gawande

Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance follows Complications by the same author and uses the same format: chapter-length essays on various topics related to the main theme. The author is both a surgeon and a dad of (at least) one kid who had serious medical problems, which gives him an interesting perspective on how the medical system [...]