Books 1-3, Atul Gawande

[tala-tale.livejournal.com]

Hi, everyone! I've been lurking here for a bit, browsing reviews and recommendations -- so many things to explore! To start this off, I got a bunch of books from the library all at once, and have been reading them over the past three weeks or so. I haven't really kept track of the order in which I've read them, so I thought that where I've read multiple books by the same author, I'd group those together.

I loved all three of Gawande's books, and would highly recommend them (and have been) to pretty much anyone I can think of. Each one draws on Gawande's experiences as a surgeon to allow him to probe the intricate interplay of human fallibility and modern knowledge, not just in medicine but in any truly complex human endeavor. What I loved about Gawande's writing in all three books was the combination of his very down-to-earth and even-handed take on the real-world situations he describes and his probing, intelligent, often very philosophical examinations of the patterns of cause-and-effect that they reveal.

( Brief reviews of all three books. )

While I think these three books would all stand alone just fine, I found that reading them in order allowed each one to build on the previous one, just as Gawande's experiences have built as he's moved from one to the next.