Better

Riveting accounts of medical failure and triumph, and how success is achieved in a complex and risk-filled profession

The struggle to perform well is universal, and nowhere is the 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 and ingenuity take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, delivery rooms in Boston, a polio outbreak in India, and malpractice courtrooms in the US. He discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors’ participation in lethal injections, examines the influence of money on modern medicine, and recounts the contentious history of hand washing. And as in all his writing, Gawande gives us an inside look at his own life as a surgeon, offering a firsthand account of work in a field where mistakes are both unavoidable and unthinkable.

‘‘ ‘A masterpiece’ —Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point‘Gawande is a writer with a scalpel pen and an X-ray eye . . . Diagnosis: riveting’ —Time‘None surpass Gawande in the ability to create a sense of immediacy, in his power to conjure the reality of the ward, the thrill of the moment-by-moment medical or surgical drama. Complications impresses for its truth and authenticity, virtues that it owes to its author being as much a forceful writer as uncompromising chronicler’ —The New York Times Book Review‘Complications is a book about medicine that reads like a thriller. Every subject Atul Gawande touches is probed and dissected and turned inside out with such deftness and feeling and counterintuitive insight that the reader is left breathless’ —Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point‘Gawande’s prose, much like the scalpel he wields, is precise, daring, but never reckless . . . Much like reading George Orwell, the reader emerges entertained, enlightened, transformed and immensely satisfied’ —Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country and The Tennis Partner‘Wrenching human tales . . . Gawande has pushed the medical yarn in a new direction’ —Boston Globe‘Gawande is arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around’ —Salon.com