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Atul Gawande

Biography

Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande is the author of four bestselling books: COMPLICATIONS, a finalist for the National Book Award; BETTER, selected by Amazon.com as one of the 10 best books of 2007; THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO; and his latest book, BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

Books by Atul Gawande

by Atul Gawande - Health, Medicine, Nonfiction, Social Sciences

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should. Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Atul Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients' anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.

written by Atul Gawande, read by Robert Petkoff - Health, Medicine, Nonfiction

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, BEING MORTAL asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.