In When Death Becomes Life, transplant surgeon Joshua D. Mezrich explains the background of organ transplant through the lens of his own experience. Part memoir, part narrative history, the book looks at the major players in transplant medicine with notable contextual details. For example, Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel was inspired to study vascular surgery by the 1894 assassination of the French president, but his groundbreaking transplant research is largely overshadowed by the popular notion that he was a Nazi sympathizer. Mezrich, who tells jokes and plays Tupac in the operating room, walks readers through procedures step by gory step and describes the challenges doctors face outside of the OR: nonstop hours, weighing the risks of surgery and guilt and depression if something goes wrong. He also grapples with ethical questions, such as whether doctors should perform liver transplants on people with alcoholism.
Readers will quickly become acquainted with medical terms like "renal" and "cyclosporine," but the technical language is balanced by thrilling accounts of medical discoveries and the author's own surgeries. In writing about his life-saving career, Mezrich is both casual--"I was interested in learning liver transplantation (the Super Bowl of the abdomen), but I also wanted to have the opportunity to mess with the pancreas"--and reverent--"I'll never forget the simple beauty of the kidney transplant, the feeling of wonder when the kidney turned pink." He recognizes the great responsibility surgeons have and takes care to show the humanity in each patient, both organ donor and recipient. --Katy Hershberger, freelance writer and bookseller