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About the Author Atul Gawande is the author of several bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Founder and Chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He is also chair of Haven, where he was CEO from 2018-2020. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts. Product Description In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is―uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction. From Booklist Surgeon, MacArthur fellow, and New Yorker staff writer Gawande follows his best-sellers Complications (2002) and Better (2007) with an electrifying manifesto that pairs the most advanced medical science with the humblest of tools: the checklist. Concerned about medical mistakes, an array of which Gawande describes in dramatic passages guaranteed to raise your blood pressure, Gawande investigated the nature of ineptitude and found that the more complex our lives and work become—a raging side effect of technology—the easier it is for us to overlook details and to err, sometimes catastrophically. Hence the well-thought-out to-do list. Overwhelming torrents of details and demands are by no means restricted to medicine. In fact, Gawande discovered the power of the checklist in his research into aviation, and he extends his inquiry to architecture, finance, and legal cases. Back on his turf, Gawande credits nurses with creating the first health checklists and describes his own quest to make and properly use a safe-surgery checklist. With numerous tales from the front and striking anatomies of cognition and distraction, Gawande’s back-to-basics credo is invaluable. --Donna Seaman Review “None surpass Gawande in the ability to create a sense of immediacy, in his power to conjure the reality of the ward, the thrill of the moment-by-moment medical or surgical drama. Complications impresses for its truth and authenticity, virtues that it owes to its author being as much forceful writer as uncompromising chronicler.” ―The New York Times Book Review “No one writes about medicine as a human subject as well as Atul Gawande. His stories about becoming a surgeon are scary, funny, absorbing....Complications is a uniquely soulful book about the science of mending bodies.” ―Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon “Gawande is arguably the best nonfiction doctor-writer around....He's prescient and thoughtful...the heir to Lewis Thomas' humble, insightful and brilliantly crafted oeuvre.” ―Salon.com “Complications is a book about medicine that reads like a thriller. Every subject Atul Gawande touches is probed and dissected and turned inside out with such deftness and feeling and counterintuitive insight that the reader is left breathless.” ―Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point “Gawande is a writer with a scalpel pen and an X-ray eye.... He turns every case--from gunshot wounds to morbid obesity to flesh-eating bacteria--into a thriller in miniature. Diagnosis: riveting.” ―Time “Gawande's prose, much like the scalpel he wields, is precise, daring, but never reckless....Much like reading George Orwell, the reader emerges entertained, enlightened, transformed and immensely satisfied.” ―Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country “Wrenching human tales...Gawande has p