Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey

Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey by Bud Shaw, 291 pages.

Bud Shaw trained under Theodore Starzl, the father of liver transplants (I want to say "liver transplant surgery", but that seems to imply that there's some non-surgical form of liver transplant. Also, liver transplant is how the author puts it), beginning in 1981, and became one of the top, if not the top, liver transplant specialists. He recounts many of the memorable episodes from his career in nonlinear chapters that read more like essays or short-stories. There are stories about learning his craft from Starzl, who comes across as a harsh and somewhat unforgiving teacher. And there are stories from his time as an established surgeon in his own right. Most of the stories in this collection that are from an earlier time deal with a much younger Shaw and his parents and the tales revolve around his grief over the loss of his mother when he was thirteen, and the evolving relationship with his father, a general surgeon, and a man Shaw admired and whom he feared disappointing.
In these essays, Shaw holds on tightly to the traumatic failures in the operating room. Liver transplants were exhausting and lasted hours and hours, and even when the operation was going well, things could go suddenly and inexplicably wrong. Shaw gives much less space to the larger number of successes, indicating that at some point in the past the group photo at the annual reunions for survivors had to be broken up into many sub-groups. The author also gives few personal details outside of those about his mother and father. His three wives are mentioned, but little information about them is given. His first marriage dissolved into a celibate separateness, and his second marriage lasted twenty-five years, and his third is ongoing. Odd details are given, but then the story around those details ignored. It is also a bit  jarring when the step-mother who appears in one vignette -- training him on the procedure for scrubbing in to the OR--  is dismissed as a drunk in another essay, with no context given. Overall a well-written, but somewhat melancholy and defensive account of an interesting life.