Short description
This collection of gripping accounts of true cases explores the power and thelimits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge.
Long description
In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is--uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Review
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 forceful writer as uncompromising chronicler. -- The New York Times Book Review
No one writes about medicine as a human subject as well as Atul Gawande. His stories about becoming a surgeon are scary, funny, absorbing....Complications is a uniquely soulful book about the science of mending bodies. --Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon
Gawande is arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around....He's prescient and thoughtful...the heir to Lewis Thomas' humble, insightful and brilliantly crafted oeuvre. -- Salon.com
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 The Tipping Point
Gawande is a writer with a scalpel pen and an X-ray eye.... He turns every case--from gunshot wounds to morbid obesity to flesh-eating bacteria--into a thriller in miniature. Diagnosis: riveting. --Time
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. -- The Boston Globe
Atul Gawande is a rare and wonderful storyteller who portrays his profession with bravery and humanity. --Ellen Goodman, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist
The stories in
cf0Complications are gripping medical mysteries that a