Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End [Paperback]

Named a Best Book of the Year byThe Washington Post,The New York Times Book Review, NPR, andChicago Tribune,now in paperback with a new reading group guide

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, 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.

In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures-in his own practices as well as others'-as life draws to a close. Riveting, honest, and humane,Being Mortalshows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life-all the way to the very end.

Wise and deeply moving. Oliver Sacks

Illuminating. Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Beautifully written . . . In his newest and best book, Gawande 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

Gawande's book is so impressive that one can believe that it may well [change the medical profession] . . . May it be widely read and inwardly digested. Diana Athill, Financial Times (UK)

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande's masterful exploration of aging, death, and the medical profession's mil“/