Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

Atul Gawande, a MacArthur fellow, is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. His first book Complications, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Gawande lives with his wife and three children in Newton, Massachusetts.

The struggle to perform well is universal: each one of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. In his new book, Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable.
 
Gawande’s gripping stories of diligence, ingenuity, and what it means to do right by people take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, labor and delivery rooms in Boston, a polio outbreak in India, and malpractice courtrooms around the country. He discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors’ participation in lethal injections, examines the influence of money on modern medicine, and recounts the astoundingly contentious history of hand washing. And as in all his writing, Gawande gives us an inside look at his own life as a practicing surgeon, offering a searingly honest firsthand account of work in a field where mistakes are both unavoidable and unthinkable.
 
At once unflinching and compassionate, Better is an exhilarating journey narrated by "a writer with a scalpel pen and an X-ray eye" (Time). Gawande’s investigation into medical professionals and how they progress from merely good to great provides rare insight into the elements of success, illuminating every area of human endeavor.

"’What does it take to be good at something, when failure is so easy?’ asks writer/physician Gawande . . . Diligence, ingenuity and ’doing right’ . . . Gawande illustrates each of these qualities with stories from his own experience, [and] his observations of and conversations with other physicians . . . For young doctors . . . Gawande suggests five strategies: Ask unscripted questions, don’t complain, ’count something’ (be a scientist as well as a doctor), write something (to make yourself part of a larger world) and change in response to new ideas. A must-read for medical professionals-and a discerning, humanizing portrait of doctors at work for the rest of us."—Kirkus Reviews