Being Mortal, from Boston surgeon Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto), displays the precision of his surgical craft and the compassion of a humanist in a frank and often emotionally powerful examination of the burden of mortality.
In this multifaceted study, Gawande aims to help both doctors and patients "figure out how to face mortality and preserve the fiber of a meaningful life." It troubles him that medical training and rapidly improving technologies often frustrate those goals, resulting in care that "fails the people it is supposed to help." Most crucially, he points out, physicians need to do more to equip elderly and terminally ill patients to make difficult decisions about their own course of treatment.
Though Being Mortal is a persuasive work of medical journalism, it takes an intensely personal turn when Gawande describes in painstaking detail the final illness and death of his father from a spinal-cord tumor. In a narrative that often attains the force and beauty of a novel, he explains the myriad choices that helped the family shape his father's path, not to a "good death," but instead to the end of a well-lived life, as in each of his father's last days he "found moments worth living for."
Only a precious few books have the power to open our eyes while they move us to tears. Atul Gawande has produced such a work. One hopes it is the spark that ignites some revolutionary changes in a field of medicine that ultimately touches each of us. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer