Koncocoo

Best Health Policy

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
In Being Mortal , bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. If you said “true,” you’d be right, of course, but that’s a statement that demands an asterisk, a “but.” “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine,” writes Atul Gawande, a surgeon (at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston) and a writer (at the New Yorker). And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” Through interviews with doctors, stories from and about health care providers (such as the woman who pioneered the notion of “assisted living” for the elderly)—and eventually, by way of the story of his own father’s dying, Gawande examines the cracks in the system of health care to the aged (i.e. 97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics) and to the seriously ill who might have different needs and expectations than the ones family members predict. (One striking example: the terminally ill former professor who told his daughter that “quality of life” for him meant the ongoing ability to enjoy chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You want Robert E. Lee... someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t.” In his compassionate, learned way, Gawande shows all of us—doctors included—how mortality must be faced, with both heart and mind. “ Being Mortal , Atul Gawande's masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession's mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet.” ― Boston Globe. For more than a decade, Atul Gawande has explored the fault lines of medicine . combining his years of experience as a surgeon with his gift for fluid, seemingly effortless storytelling . has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one.” ― The New York Review of Books. “A deeply affecting, urgently important book--one not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.” ―Katherine Boo. Gawande's book is not of the kind that some doctors write, reminding us how grim the fact of death can be. Rather, he shows how patients in the terminal phase of their illness can maintain important qualities of life.” ― Wall Street Journal (Best Books of 2014). “ Being Mortal left me tearful, angry, and unable to stop talking about it for a week. A surgeon himself, Gawande is eloquent about the inadequacy of medical school in preparing doctors to confront the subject of death with their patients. “We have come to medicalize aging, frailty, and death, treating them as if they were just one more clinical problem to overcome. Being Mortal is not only wise and deeply moving, it is an essential and insightful book for our times, as one would expect from Atul Gawande, one of our finest physician writers.” ―Oliver Sacks. “A great read that leaves you better equipped to face the future, and without making you feel like you just took your medicine.” ― Mother Jones (Best Books of 2014). One hopes it is the spark that ignites some revolutionary changes in a field of medicine that ultimately touches each of us.” ― Shelf Awareness (Best Books of 2014). “A needed call to action, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and often does, when a society fails to engage in a sustained discussion about aging and dying.” ― San Francisco Chronicle.
Reviews
"People of any age want the right to lock their doors, set the temperature they want, dress how they like, eat what they want, admit visitors only when they're in the mood. Yet, nursing homes (and even assisted living communities) are geared toward making these decisions for people in order to keep them safe, gain government funds, and ensure a routine for the facility. In addition, Dr. Gawande shows how end-of-life physical conditions are most often treated as medical crises needing to be "fixed," instead of managed for quality of life when treatment has become futile. He tells a great story of a doctor who convinced a nursing home to bring in two dogs, four cats and one hundred birds!"
"In reading many of his previous books I found he always asked questions: Why do we do things; for what purpose; is this working to achieve the best results for the patient in his physical and cultural circumstance? In speaking of elder care he sadly points out that "Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm and suffering we inflict on people and has denied them the basic comforts they need most". He looks at the "Dying Role" as the end approaches describing it as the patient's ability to "share memories, pass on wisdom and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish legacies and make peace with their God. Gawande shares his deep seated feelings in this book by revealing personal vignettes of how friends and family coped with these powerful and challenging issues."
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An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back
At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. Rosenthal told an interviewer her goal was to “start a very loud conversation” that will be “difficult politically to ignore.” We need such a conversation – not just about how the market fails, but about how we can change the political realities that stand in the way of fixing it.”— The New York Times Book Review “Patients can save thousands of dollars by purchasing An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal.”— New York Journal of Books. “Bold, insightful, well-researched analysis.” — Nature “Truly remarkable for the extensive interviews and range of documentation it provides.” — American Psychological Association “In this in-depth analysis of a malfunctioning system, Rosenthal makes a compelling case against the hospital and pharmaceutical executives behind the “money chase,” and it’s hard to imagine a more educated, credible guide…The patients she interviewed share mind-boggling stories…She builds her case with one damning statistic after another…Rosenthal presents solutions both personal and societal in this commanding and necessary call to arms.” —Booklist (starred) “Provocatively analyzes...Rosenthal unveils with surgical precision the "dysfunctional medical market"...a startling cascade.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review). I have not read another volume that diagnoses the “deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed” system of health insurance and delivery with such lucidity, dissects its critical shortcomings, and provides such a clear prescription for its ills. Bold, imaginative, tautly written and filled with fury and compassion, this book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s remarkable, outrage-inducing book reveals how each attempt to check the health industry’s excesses has been exploited for monetary gain. Both a fascinating history of dysfunction, and a clear manifesto for change.” —Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Five Days at Memorial and War Hospital “Through vivid, heart wrenching stories and trenchant analysis, Libby Rosenthal unveils the irrationality, indifference, harmfulness, and downright unfairness of the American health care system that can often seem more driven by profit than caring and compassion.
Reviews
"An American Sickness is a gripping, fast paced and revolting dive from 50,000 feet above into the morass of what passes for healthcare in the USA. Patients are barely tolerated in a system optimized to pass money from bank accounts to providers. Because Rosenthal (an MD herself) was a columnist for the New York Times, she received thousands of contacts over the years. She researched them and they provide the vivid and shameful examples of financial abuse in the industry (with real names). She has distilled them into a perverse list of principles of US healthcare that explains everything and forms the backbone of the book: 1. As the American economy freefalls into dysfunction, doctors and nurses have become “independent contractors”, just like everyone else. Administrators are no longer senior caregivers but numbers people who must limit the poorly insured and maximize the profit on every square foot. The rest of the western world and history are the proof: “If the March of Dimes was operating according to today’s foundation models, we’d have iron lungs in five different colors controlled by iPhone apps – but we wouldn’t have a cheap polio vaccine,” Rosenthal quotes Dr. Michael Brownlee. Rosenthal provides really useful links and sample letters, because customers are all in this same situation – ignorant and powerless. This book is worth far more than a month’s health insurance; it can save you a fortune, and give you back your life."
"I have been a nurse since 1978 and have had a front row seat to the changes in health care in the ensuing decades."
"Not a subject matter I would normally be interested in, but in the current political climate I felt I should get a better understanding of what is going on in the healthcare industries. I am not a big fan of the government getting involved in healthcare, however if we are going to let free enterprise control the costs I think it is important to know if the healthcare industries will respond to true competition like other industries such as the telecommunication and automotive industries."
"The probable fix is some sort of single payer system like those used in the rest of the developed world but in the meantime, this book by a Harvard educated MD can help provide you with some defensive measures. So they can claim the doc is hospital affiliated and raise his charges by 35-100% for facilities fees, even if he doesn't move from his current office."
"When you scrutinize your insurance statements and feel relieved that all you had to pay was zero or a small co-pay, what you don't realize is that our complacency has enabled hospitals, doctors, insurance, pharmaceuticals, device manufactures, and more to reap huge profits -- oh, "operating surplus.""
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The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
A New York Times Bestseller, with an updated explanation of the 2010 Health Reform Bill Bringing to bear his talent for explaining complex issues in a clear, engaging way, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid visits industrialized democracies around the world--France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and beyond--to provide a revelatory tour of successful, affordable universal health care systems. Neither financial prudence nor concern for the commonweal explains the American position, according to Reid, whose findings divulge that the U.S. not only spends more money on health care than any other nation but also leaves 45 million residents uninsured, allowing about 22,000 to die from easily treatable diseases. For all the scope of his research and his ability to mint neat rebuttals to the common American misconception that universal health care is socialized medicine, Reid neglects to address the elephant in the room: just how are we to sell these changes to the mighty providers and insurers?
Reviews
"What I didn't know other than from some very biased perspectives- my right wing friends who say all "socialized" medicine is horrible with no choice and long lines- and smear jobs like the movie "Sicko" was what are others doing that is better than us? Reid does an excellent and it seems objective job of summarizing the pros and the cons of each medical system he visits. What every system in the developed world seems to have in common, outside of the United States, is the will the moral imperative, that everyone will be covered. Hopeful because other countries have made the change from where we are today to a more equitable and cost effective system where everyone gets covered and outcomes are actually better than they are here."
"As an American, I feel that this should be required reading so that we understand what it could be like if we ever started treating healthcare like a human right instead of the commodity that it currently is."
"Reid writes a very readable and lively book comparing the US Health System (really a hodgepodge of systems) with several other developed countries. This is not the place for finding current analysis of ACA."
"The author attempts to take a (somewhat) unbiased approach on healthcare, and when it's applicable he states what values he's using (so if you disagree with his conclusions at least you know it possibly stems from disparate premises). So instead of looking at an abstract ideal he understands that healthcare systems are a "reflection of [their country's] history, politics, economy, and national values." From here the book goes on to take an in depth look at the different healthcare models developed by multiple countries and the pros AND CONS that surround each one."
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Best Social Policy

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back
At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. Rosenthal told an interviewer her goal was to “start a very loud conversation” that will be “difficult politically to ignore.” We need such a conversation – not just about how the market fails, but about how we can change the political realities that stand in the way of fixing it.”— The New York Times Book Review “Patients can save thousands of dollars by purchasing An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal.”— New York Journal of Books. “Bold, insightful, well-researched analysis.” — Nature “Truly remarkable for the extensive interviews and range of documentation it provides.” — American Psychological Association “In this in-depth analysis of a malfunctioning system, Rosenthal makes a compelling case against the hospital and pharmaceutical executives behind the “money chase,” and it’s hard to imagine a more educated, credible guide…The patients she interviewed share mind-boggling stories…She builds her case with one damning statistic after another…Rosenthal presents solutions both personal and societal in this commanding and necessary call to arms.” —Booklist (starred) “Provocatively analyzes...Rosenthal unveils with surgical precision the "dysfunctional medical market"...a startling cascade.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review). I have not read another volume that diagnoses the “deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed” system of health insurance and delivery with such lucidity, dissects its critical shortcomings, and provides such a clear prescription for its ills. Bold, imaginative, tautly written and filled with fury and compassion, this book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s remarkable, outrage-inducing book reveals how each attempt to check the health industry’s excesses has been exploited for monetary gain. Both a fascinating history of dysfunction, and a clear manifesto for change.” —Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Five Days at Memorial and War Hospital “Through vivid, heart wrenching stories and trenchant analysis, Libby Rosenthal unveils the irrationality, indifference, harmfulness, and downright unfairness of the American health care system that can often seem more driven by profit than caring and compassion.
Reviews
"An American Sickness is a gripping, fast paced and revolting dive from 50,000 feet above into the morass of what passes for healthcare in the USA. Patients are barely tolerated in a system optimized to pass money from bank accounts to providers. Because Rosenthal (an MD herself) was a columnist for the New York Times, she received thousands of contacts over the years. She researched them and they provide the vivid and shameful examples of financial abuse in the industry (with real names). She has distilled them into a perverse list of principles of US healthcare that explains everything and forms the backbone of the book: 1. As the American economy freefalls into dysfunction, doctors and nurses have become “independent contractors”, just like everyone else. Administrators are no longer senior caregivers but numbers people who must limit the poorly insured and maximize the profit on every square foot. The rest of the western world and history are the proof: “If the March of Dimes was operating according to today’s foundation models, we’d have iron lungs in five different colors controlled by iPhone apps – but we wouldn’t have a cheap polio vaccine,” Rosenthal quotes Dr. Michael Brownlee. Rosenthal provides really useful links and sample letters, because customers are all in this same situation – ignorant and powerless. This book is worth far more than a month’s health insurance; it can save you a fortune, and give you back your life."
"I have been a nurse since 1978 and have had a front row seat to the changes in health care in the ensuing decades."
"Not a subject matter I would normally be interested in, but in the current political climate I felt I should get a better understanding of what is going on in the healthcare industries. I am not a big fan of the government getting involved in healthcare, however if we are going to let free enterprise control the costs I think it is important to know if the healthcare industries will respond to true competition like other industries such as the telecommunication and automotive industries."
"While we cannot mandate morals, consumers can choose alternatives to products and services born from financial incentives. But the greed of corporate organizations, a select few physicians and physician group practice managers who want to 'maximize' income charge prices that far exceed the value of what is given."
"Dr. Rosenthal's background makes her uniquely qualified to write this well-researched book."
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Best Health Care Delivery

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
In Being Mortal , bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. If you said “true,” you’d be right, of course, but that’s a statement that demands an asterisk, a “but.” “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine,” writes Atul Gawande, a surgeon (at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston) and a writer (at the New Yorker). And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” Through interviews with doctors, stories from and about health care providers (such as the woman who pioneered the notion of “assisted living” for the elderly)—and eventually, by way of the story of his own father’s dying, Gawande examines the cracks in the system of health care to the aged (i.e. 97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics) and to the seriously ill who might have different needs and expectations than the ones family members predict. (One striking example: the terminally ill former professor who told his daughter that “quality of life” for him meant the ongoing ability to enjoy chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You want Robert E. Lee... someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t.” In his compassionate, learned way, Gawande shows all of us—doctors included—how mortality must be faced, with both heart and mind. “ Being Mortal , Atul Gawande's masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession's mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet.” ― Boston Globe. For more than a decade, Atul Gawande has explored the fault lines of medicine . combining his years of experience as a surgeon with his gift for fluid, seemingly effortless storytelling . has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one.” ― The New York Review of Books. “A deeply affecting, urgently important book--one not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.” ―Katherine Boo. Gawande's book is not of the kind that some doctors write, reminding us how grim the fact of death can be. Rather, he shows how patients in the terminal phase of their illness can maintain important qualities of life.” ― Wall Street Journal (Best Books of 2014). “ Being Mortal left me tearful, angry, and unable to stop talking about it for a week. A surgeon himself, Gawande is eloquent about the inadequacy of medical school in preparing doctors to confront the subject of death with their patients. “We have come to medicalize aging, frailty, and death, treating them as if they were just one more clinical problem to overcome. Being Mortal is not only wise and deeply moving, it is an essential and insightful book for our times, as one would expect from Atul Gawande, one of our finest physician writers.” ―Oliver Sacks. “A great read that leaves you better equipped to face the future, and without making you feel like you just took your medicine.” ― Mother Jones (Best Books of 2014). One hopes it is the spark that ignites some revolutionary changes in a field of medicine that ultimately touches each of us.” ― Shelf Awareness (Best Books of 2014). “A needed call to action, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and often does, when a society fails to engage in a sustained discussion about aging and dying.” ― San Francisco Chronicle.
Reviews
"People of any age want the right to lock their doors, set the temperature they want, dress how they like, eat what they want, admit visitors only when they're in the mood. Yet, nursing homes (and even assisted living communities) are geared toward making these decisions for people in order to keep them safe, gain government funds, and ensure a routine for the facility. In addition, Dr. Gawande shows how end-of-life physical conditions are most often treated as medical crises needing to be "fixed," instead of managed for quality of life when treatment has become futile. He tells a great story of a doctor who convinced a nursing home to bring in two dogs, four cats and one hundred birds!"
"In reading many of his previous books I found he always asked questions: Why do we do things; for what purpose; is this working to achieve the best results for the patient in his physical and cultural circumstance? In speaking of elder care he sadly points out that "Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm and suffering we inflict on people and has denied them the basic comforts they need most". He looks at the "Dying Role" as the end approaches describing it as the patient's ability to "share memories, pass on wisdom and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish legacies and make peace with their God. Gawande shares his deep seated feelings in this book by revealing personal vignettes of how friends and family coped with these powerful and challenging issues."
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Best Sociology

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. ''[A] compassionate, discerning sociological analysis...Combining thoughtful inquiry with firsthand experience, Mr. Vance has inadvertently provided a civilized reference guide for an uncivilized election, and he's done so in a vocabulary intelligible to both Democrats and Republicans. ( Jennifer Senior, New York Times ). ''[ Hillbilly Elegy ] is a beautiful memoir but it is equally a work of cultural criticism about white working-class America....[Vance] offers a compelling explanation for why it's so hard for someone who grew up the way he did to make it...a riveting book.''. ''[An] understated, engaging debut...An unusually timely and deeply affecting view of a social class whose health and economic problems are making headlines in this election year.''. ''Vance compellingly describes the terrible toll that alcoholism, drug abuse, and an unrelenting code of honor took on his family, neither excusing the behavior nor condemning it...The portrait that emerges is a complex one...Unerringly forthright, remarkably insightful, and refreshingly focused, Hillbilly Elegy is the cry of a community in crisis.''. ''A beautifully and powerfully written memoir about the author's journey from a troubled, addiction-torn Appalachian family to Yale Law School, Hillbilly Elegy is shocking, heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, and hysterically funny. It's also a profoundly important book, one that opens a window on a part of America usually hidden from view and offers genuine hope in the form of hard-hitting honesty. From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class through the author’s own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J.D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels.
Reviews
"Drugs, crime, jail time, abusive interactions without any knowledge of other forms of interaction, children growing up in a wild mix of stoned mother care, foster care, and care by temporary "boyfriends," and in general, an image of life on the edge of survival where even the heroes are distinctly flawed for lack of knowledge and experience of any other way of living. Second, the author's growing realization, fully present by the end of the work, that while individuals do not have total control over the shapes of their lives, their choices do in fact matter—that even if one can't direct one's life like a film, one does always have the at least the input into life that comes from being free to make choices, every day, and in every situation. I hate to fall into self-analysis and virtue-signaling behavior in a public review, but in this case I feel compelled to say that the author really did leave with me a renewed motivation to make more of my life every day, to respect and consider the choices that confront me much more carefully, and to seize moments of opportunity with aplomb when they present themselves."
"I never heard of the author until I saw him on Morning Joe a few days ago but I looked him up and read several articles he wrote for various publications so I bought his book. He suggests that tribalism, mistrust of outsiders and "elites," violence and irresponsibility among family members, parents without ethics and a sense of responsibility, terrible work ethics, and an us-against-them mentality is dooming the people who live that way to becoming poorer, more addicted, and more marginalized."
"I grew up without running water in Boone County, WV, and wound up with a degree from Harvard Law School."
"I escaped inner city Baltimore (see The Wire) due to luck, the ability to do well in school and a few good teachers.Instead of trying to describe my early life to my family and friends, I will give them this book."
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Best Medical eBooks

When Breath Becomes Air
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to him—passionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to die—so well.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead.” — The Boston Globe. When Paul Kalanithi is given his diagnosis he is forced to see this disease, and the process of being sick, as a patient rather than a doctor--the result of his experience is not just a look at what living is and how it works from a scientific perspective, but the ins and outs of what makes life matter. As he wrote to a friend: ‘It’s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough.’ And just important enough to be unmissable.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, written as he faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, is inherently sad. It is, despite its grim undertone, accidentally inspiring.” — The Washington Post “Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy. [Kalanithi] is so likeable, so relatable, and so humble, that you become immersed in his world and forget where it’s all heading.” — USA Today “It’s [Kalanithi’s] unsentimental approach that makes When Breath Becomes Air so original—and so devastating. Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early.” — Entertainment Weekly “[ When Breath Becomes Air ] split my head open with its beauty.” —Cheryl Strayed. “Rattling, heartbreaking, and ultimately beautiful, the too-young Dr. Kalanithi’s memoir is proof that the dying are the ones who have the most to teach us about life.” —Atul Gawande “Thanks to When Breath Becomes Air, those of us who never met Paul Kalanithi will both mourn his death and benefit from his life. Kalanithi strives to define his dual role as physician and patient, and he weighs in on such topics as what makes life meaningful and how one determines what is most important when little time is left. This deeply moving memoir reveals how much can be achieved through service and gratitude when a life is courageously and resiliently lived.” — Publishers Weekly “A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity . Every doctor should read this book—written by a member of our own tribe, it helps us understand and overcome the barriers we all erect between ourselves and our patients as soon as we are out of medical school.” —Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery “A tremendous book, crackling with life, animated by wonder and by the question of how we should live.
Reviews
"Ultimately there's not much triumph in it in the traditional sense but there is a dogged, quiet resilience and a frank earthiness that endures long after the last word appears. Dr. Kalanithi talks about his upbringing as the child of hardworking Indian immigrant parents and his tenacious and passionate espousal of medicine and literature. He speaks lovingly of his relationship with his remarkable wife - also a doctor - who he met in medical school and who played an outsized role in supporting him through everything he went through. He had a stunning and multifaceted career, studying biology and literature at Stanford, then history and philosophy of medicine at Cambridge, and finally neurosurgery at Yale. The mark of a man of letters is evident everywhere in the book, and quotes from Eliot, Beckett, Pope and Shakespeare make frequent appearances. Metaphors abound and the prose often soars: When describing how important it is to develop good surgical technique, he tells us that "Technical excellence was a moral requirement"; meanwhile, the overwhelming stress of late night shifts, hundred hour weeks and patients with acute trauma made him occasionally feel like he was "trapped in an endless jungle summer, wet with sweat, the rain of tears of the dying pouring down". The painful uncertainty which he documents - in particular the tyranny of statistics which makes it impossible to predict how a specific individual will react to cancer therapy - must sadly be familiar to anyone who has had experience with the disease. There are heartbreaking descriptions of how at one point the cancer seemed to have almost disappeared and how, after Dr. Kalanithi had again cautiously made plans for a hopeful future with his wife, it returned with a vengeance and he had to finally stop working."
"He says this, “The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win …You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which are ceaselessly striving. In the foreword by fellow doctor and writer Abraham Verghese, that doctor writes, “He (Paul) wasn’t writing about anything—he was writing about time and what it meant to him now, in the context of his illness.” And in the afterword by his wife Lucy, the meaning of that time becomes even clearer."
"The introspective reader is taken on some part of Dr. Kalanithi's journey from strength to vulnerability, and one cannot help but marvel at and be inspired by his determination to share his insights and experiences by writing a book despite the physical discomfort he was going through."
"Like when you go running and forget you are on a run, because you are one with the run; reading this I was so absorbed, it was like I was listening to Paul, hearing his words, versus reading them...."
"It is so beautifully written how he and his wife learn to make the best of a terrible disease and the way it impacted their relationship and life plans.i would recommend it to anyone in the health field especially doctors to gain understanding for their patients and to anyone who wants to help a friend or relative with a life threatening disease."
"This book tells the heart wrenching story of a family and physician who had to face death."
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Best Insurance

An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back
At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. Rosenthal told an interviewer her goal was to “start a very loud conversation” that will be “difficult politically to ignore.” We need such a conversation – not just about how the market fails, but about how we can change the political realities that stand in the way of fixing it.”— The New York Times Book Review “Patients can save thousands of dollars by purchasing An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal.”— New York Journal of Books. “Bold, insightful, well-researched analysis.” — Nature “Truly remarkable for the extensive interviews and range of documentation it provides.” — American Psychological Association “In this in-depth analysis of a malfunctioning system, Rosenthal makes a compelling case against the hospital and pharmaceutical executives behind the “money chase,” and it’s hard to imagine a more educated, credible guide…The patients she interviewed share mind-boggling stories…She builds her case with one damning statistic after another…Rosenthal presents solutions both personal and societal in this commanding and necessary call to arms.” —Booklist (starred) “Provocatively analyzes...Rosenthal unveils with surgical precision the "dysfunctional medical market"...a startling cascade.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review). I have not read another volume that diagnoses the “deeply, perhaps fatally, flawed” system of health insurance and delivery with such lucidity, dissects its critical shortcomings, and provides such a clear prescription for its ills. Bold, imaginative, tautly written and filled with fury and compassion, this book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene. Elisabeth Rosenthal’s remarkable, outrage-inducing book reveals how each attempt to check the health industry’s excesses has been exploited for monetary gain. Both a fascinating history of dysfunction, and a clear manifesto for change.” —Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Five Days at Memorial and War Hospital “Through vivid, heart wrenching stories and trenchant analysis, Libby Rosenthal unveils the irrationality, indifference, harmfulness, and downright unfairness of the American health care system that can often seem more driven by profit than caring and compassion.
Reviews
"An American Sickness is a gripping, fast paced and revolting dive from 50,000 feet above into the morass of what passes for healthcare in the USA. Patients are barely tolerated in a system optimized to pass money from bank accounts to providers. Because Rosenthal (an MD herself) was a columnist for the New York Times, she received thousands of contacts over the years. She researched them and they provide the vivid and shameful examples of financial abuse in the industry (with real names). She has distilled them into a perverse list of principles of US healthcare that explains everything and forms the backbone of the book: 1. As the American economy freefalls into dysfunction, doctors and nurses have become “independent contractors”, just like everyone else. Administrators are no longer senior caregivers but numbers people who must limit the poorly insured and maximize the profit on every square foot. The rest of the western world and history are the proof: “If the March of Dimes was operating according to today’s foundation models, we’d have iron lungs in five different colors controlled by iPhone apps – but we wouldn’t have a cheap polio vaccine,” Rosenthal quotes Dr. Michael Brownlee. Rosenthal provides really useful links and sample letters, because customers are all in this same situation – ignorant and powerless. This book is worth far more than a month’s health insurance; it can save you a fortune, and give you back your life."
"I have been a nurse since 1978 and have had a front row seat to the changes in health care in the ensuing decades."
"Not a subject matter I would normally be interested in, but in the current political climate I felt I should get a better understanding of what is going on in the healthcare industries. I am not a big fan of the government getting involved in healthcare, however if we are going to let free enterprise control the costs I think it is important to know if the healthcare industries will respond to true competition like other industries such as the telecommunication and automotive industries."
"The probable fix is some sort of single payer system like those used in the rest of the developed world but in the meantime, this book by a Harvard educated MD can help provide you with some defensive measures. So they can claim the doc is hospital affiliated and raise his charges by 35-100% for facilities fees, even if he doesn't move from his current office."
"When you scrutinize your insurance statements and feel relieved that all you had to pay was zero or a small co-pay, what you don't realize is that our complacency has enabled hospitals, doctors, insurance, pharmaceuticals, device manufactures, and more to reap huge profits -- oh, "operating surplus.""
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Best AIDS

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
Upon it's first publication twenty years ago, And The Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. His work is critical of the medical and scientific communities' initial response and particularly harsh on the Reagan Administration, who he claims cut funding, ignored calls for action and deliberately misled Congress. "An exhaustive account of the early years of the AIDS crisis, this outlines the medical, social and political forces behind the epidemic's origin and rapid spread," reported PW .
Reviews
"There was no sex education that i could remember and the only thing I do remember about AIDS was a gym teacher telling the class that if you are gay, your tongue will turn purple and you will die of AIDS."
"I remember hearing of a "homosexual disease" in early summer 1981, which was surprisingly early, especially for an Ohioan."
"I didn’t really understand the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis since I was too young."
"This book gives the story of the start of the aids epidemic and the missteps and prejudices by doctors, government, and media that led to this problem."
"The story successfully blends a number of elements: competitive jealousies within the scientific community (it's likely that the French actually discovered the AIDS virus, despite a neck-in-neck US researcher who claimed the glory), the politics of the slow-moving National Institutes of Health (NIH), Reagan's stubborn refusal to address the AIDS issue (he finally did so six years after the epidemic began--and after 20,850 citizens had died), and a number of incredibly touching stories of people with the disease. One thing I hadn't known was the schism within the gay community: some people recognizing the reality of the threat while others (understandably) discounted it as internalized homophobia or as a homophobic attempt at sexual repression. This book captures a period in time where, in the midst of sometimes slow-moving science, second-class-citizen politics, and a seemingly indifferent larger society, some dedicated people struggled to raise awareness, to change habits, and others, to face death with equanimity."
"The "Butcher's Bill," the tally of deaths to AIDS, is a steady drumbeat in each chapter as LGBT activists on the ground race to care for the dying as bureaucracy hampers research and recognition for the virus."
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Best Professional & Technical

When Breath Becomes Air
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both. And part comes from the way he conveys what happened to him—passionately working and striving, deferring gratification, waiting to live, learning to die—so well.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times. The book brims with insightful reflections on mortality that are especially poignant coming from a trained physician familiar with what lies ahead.” — The Boston Globe. When Paul Kalanithi is given his diagnosis he is forced to see this disease, and the process of being sick, as a patient rather than a doctor--the result of his experience is not just a look at what living is and how it works from a scientific perspective, but the ins and outs of what makes life matter. As he wrote to a friend: ‘It’s just tragic enough and just imaginable enough.’ And just important enough to be unmissable.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, written as he faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, is inherently sad. It is, despite its grim undertone, accidentally inspiring.” — The Washington Post “Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, possesses the gravity and wisdom of an ancient Greek tragedy. [Kalanithi] is so likeable, so relatable, and so humble, that you become immersed in his world and forget where it’s all heading.” — USA Today “It’s [Kalanithi’s] unsentimental approach that makes When Breath Becomes Air so original—and so devastating. Its only fault is that the book, like his life, ends much too early.” — Entertainment Weekly “[ When Breath Becomes Air ] split my head open with its beauty.” —Cheryl Strayed. “Rattling, heartbreaking, and ultimately beautiful, the too-young Dr. Kalanithi’s memoir is proof that the dying are the ones who have the most to teach us about life.” —Atul Gawande “Thanks to When Breath Becomes Air, those of us who never met Paul Kalanithi will both mourn his death and benefit from his life. Kalanithi strives to define his dual role as physician and patient, and he weighs in on such topics as what makes life meaningful and how one determines what is most important when little time is left. This deeply moving memoir reveals how much can be achieved through service and gratitude when a life is courageously and resiliently lived.” — Publishers Weekly “A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity . Every doctor should read this book—written by a member of our own tribe, it helps us understand and overcome the barriers we all erect between ourselves and our patients as soon as we are out of medical school.” —Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery “A tremendous book, crackling with life, animated by wonder and by the question of how we should live.
Reviews
"Ultimately there's not much triumph in it in the traditional sense but there is a dogged, quiet resilience and a frank earthiness that endures long after the last word appears. Dr. Kalanithi talks about his upbringing as the child of hardworking Indian immigrant parents and his tenacious and passionate espousal of medicine and literature. He speaks lovingly of his relationship with his remarkable wife - also a doctor - who he met in medical school and who played an outsized role in supporting him through everything he went through. He had a stunning and multifaceted career, studying biology and literature at Stanford, then history and philosophy of medicine at Cambridge, and finally neurosurgery at Yale. The mark of a man of letters is evident everywhere in the book, and quotes from Eliot, Beckett, Pope and Shakespeare make frequent appearances. Metaphors abound and the prose often soars: When describing how important it is to develop good surgical technique, he tells us that "Technical excellence was a moral requirement"; meanwhile, the overwhelming stress of late night shifts, hundred hour weeks and patients with acute trauma made him occasionally feel like he was "trapped in an endless jungle summer, wet with sweat, the rain of tears of the dying pouring down". The painful uncertainty which he documents - in particular the tyranny of statistics which makes it impossible to predict how a specific individual will react to cancer therapy - must sadly be familiar to anyone who has had experience with the disease. There are heartbreaking descriptions of how at one point the cancer seemed to have almost disappeared and how, after Dr. Kalanithi had again cautiously made plans for a hopeful future with his wife, it returned with a vengeance and he had to finally stop working."
"He says this, “The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win …You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which are ceaselessly striving. In the foreword by fellow doctor and writer Abraham Verghese, that doctor writes, “He (Paul) wasn’t writing about anything—he was writing about time and what it meant to him now, in the context of his illness.” And in the afterword by his wife Lucy, the meaning of that time becomes even clearer."
"The beautifully written epilogue, which was written by his wife Lucy, will break your heart, and give you hope at the same time. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.""
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Best AIDS & HIV

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th-Anniversary Edition
Upon it's first publication twenty years ago, And The Band Played on was quickly recognized as a masterpiece of investigative reporting. His work is critical of the medical and scientific communities' initial response and particularly harsh on the Reagan Administration, who he claims cut funding, ignored calls for action and deliberately misled Congress. "An exhaustive account of the early years of the AIDS crisis, this outlines the medical, social and political forces behind the epidemic's origin and rapid spread," reported PW .
Reviews
"I always knew I'd read this book eventually, but as with any long non-fiction tome there comes a risk that at some point your attention span might have to bow out. It seems almost an omniscient narrative voice in involved, and with over 900 interviews and his own previous years of investigative work on AIDS, there's a reason for that. His book, already a tribute to a lost generation, is now an example of all the substantive contributions those men and women could've made if politics could have been shoved aside sooner."
"There was no sex education that i could remember and the only thing I do remember about AIDS was a gym teacher telling the class that if you are gay, your tongue will turn purple and you will die of AIDS."
"I remember hearing of a "homosexual disease" in early summer 1981, which was surprisingly early, especially for an Ohioan."
"I didn’t really understand the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis since I was too young."
"With that being said, this is far and away the best book I have ever read on the AIDS epidemic."
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Best Physician & Patient Hospice Care

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
In Being Mortal , bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. If you said “true,” you’d be right, of course, but that’s a statement that demands an asterisk, a “but.” “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine,” writes Atul Gawande, a surgeon (at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston) and a writer (at the New Yorker). And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” Through interviews with doctors, stories from and about health care providers (such as the woman who pioneered the notion of “assisted living” for the elderly)—and eventually, by way of the story of his own father’s dying, Gawande examines the cracks in the system of health care to the aged (i.e. 97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics) and to the seriously ill who might have different needs and expectations than the ones family members predict. (One striking example: the terminally ill former professor who told his daughter that “quality of life” for him meant the ongoing ability to enjoy chocolate ice cream and watch football on TV. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You want Robert E. Lee... someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t.” In his compassionate, learned way, Gawande shows all of us—doctors included—how mortality must be faced, with both heart and mind. “ Being Mortal , Atul Gawande's masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession's mishandling of both, is his best and most personal book yet.” ― Boston Globe. For more than a decade, Atul Gawande has explored the fault lines of medicine . combining his years of experience as a surgeon with his gift for fluid, seemingly effortless storytelling . has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one.” ― The New York Review of Books. “A deeply affecting, urgently important book--one not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.” ―Katherine Boo. Gawande's book is not of the kind that some doctors write, reminding us how grim the fact of death can be. Rather, he shows how patients in the terminal phase of their illness can maintain important qualities of life.” ― Wall Street Journal (Best Books of 2014). “ Being Mortal left me tearful, angry, and unable to stop talking about it for a week. A surgeon himself, Gawande is eloquent about the inadequacy of medical school in preparing doctors to confront the subject of death with their patients. “We have come to medicalize aging, frailty, and death, treating them as if they were just one more clinical problem to overcome. Being Mortal is not only wise and deeply moving, it is an essential and insightful book for our times, as one would expect from Atul Gawande, one of our finest physician writers.” ―Oliver Sacks. “A great read that leaves you better equipped to face the future, and without making you feel like you just took your medicine.” ― Mother Jones (Best Books of 2014). One hopes it is the spark that ignites some revolutionary changes in a field of medicine that ultimately touches each of us.” ― Shelf Awareness (Best Books of 2014). “A needed call to action, a cautionary tale of what can go wrong, and often does, when a society fails to engage in a sustained discussion about aging and dying.” ― San Francisco Chronicle.
Reviews
"People of any age want the right to lock their doors, set the temperature they want, dress how they like, eat what they want, admit visitors only when they're in the mood. Yet, nursing homes (and even assisted living communities) are geared toward making these decisions for people in order to keep them safe, gain government funds, and ensure a routine for the facility. In addition, Dr. Gawande shows how end-of-life physical conditions are most often treated as medical crises needing to be "fixed," instead of managed for quality of life when treatment has become futile. He tells a great story of a doctor who convinced a nursing home to bring in two dogs, four cats and one hundred birds!"
"In reading many of his previous books I found he always asked questions: Why do we do things; for what purpose; is this working to achieve the best results for the patient in his physical and cultural circumstance? In speaking of elder care he sadly points out that "Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm and suffering we inflict on people and has denied them the basic comforts they need most". He looks at the "Dying Role" as the end approaches describing it as the patient's ability to "share memories, pass on wisdom and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish legacies and make peace with their God. Gawande shares his deep seated feelings in this book by revealing personal vignettes of how friends and family coped with these powerful and challenging issues."
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