Being mortal, by Atul Gawande

Gawande, a surgeon, is also a brilliant writer and innovative thinker – his Checklist manifesto, which takes the simple idea of following a checklist of procedures so that nothing is overlooked, expands the concept from avoiding mistakes in surgery to aviation (which relies heavily on checklists) to many other areas of our increasingly complex world.  Being mortal is about death, or more specifically, dying, and how modern medicine so often gets it all wrong.  Doctors are trained to “fix” problems, to cure disease, but at the end of life, not everything can be fixed.  In fact, most things can’t.  You can’t fix old age.  But you can help people make the right decisions about which medical interventions to proceed with and which will only make the end stages of life more difficult for all concerned.  Anyone who has ever been in the position of making end-of-life decisions for or with a loved one will recognize their own situation somewhere in this book.  The final chapters about his own father’s death are very moving.  Required reading if you are human and expect to die someday.  304 pp.