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Summer chiller
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Harlan Coben Brilliance, $38.95 12 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 9781597376372
Health care is a major national issue and an intensely personal one for all of us. At some point, we have or will put our own lives, our children's and our parents' in the hands of doctors. And we all hope that we can trust their diligence and dedication. Two extraordinary books, now extraordinary audio presentations, make the medical profession more comprehensible and more fascinating. With surprising candor, Jerome Groopman, a distinguished Harvard physician, New Yorker writer and best-selling author, examines How Doctors Think. To explain how a doctor arrives at a particular diagnosis, why it might be a feat of brilliant deduction or just plain wrong, Groopman did extensive interviews with some of our finest doctors and shares his own clinical experiences, both good and bad. The stories he tells to illustrate his diagnosis of the diagnostic process are life-and-death, attention-grabbing incidents that happened to real people, more compelling than anything you'll see on a TV hospital drama. What you'll learn is how patient-doctor interaction affects a physician's cognitive process and how you as a patient can positively alter communication and care.
By Jerome Groopman Tantor, $34.99 10.5 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 9781400104253
By Atul Gawande Audio Renaissance, $29.95 7.5 hours unabridged, CD ISBN 9781427200893
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Harlan Coben calls his latest, best yet, thriller-diller The Woods. And those woods hold dark, destructive secrets that are revealed bit by menacing bit, as plot within tangled plot begins to play out. Paul Copeland, county prosecutor for Essex, New Jersey, is in the midst of the biggest, headline-making case of his career (rich white frat boys accused of raping a black stripper—sound familiar?), when he's asked by two Manhattan cops to identify a body, a body that will take Paul back to the trauma of his adolescence and "the woods." Twenty years ago, Paul's sister and three of her teenaged friends went into the woods near their summer camp and never came out; two bodies were found, two never surfaced, all presumed victims of "the summer slasher," an admitted serial killer. Paul, security counselor that night, should have stopped them, but he was trysting in those very woods with his girlfriend. Haunted all these years by that shattering night, Paul must figure out what really happened two decades ago, why the devastating event is being exhumed now and who and what is behind it all. Guaranteed to make your spine tingle on the hottest days.
Sukey's favorites
Atul Gawande, a 2006 MacArthur Fellow, is also a Harvard doctor, New Yorker writer and best-selling author. Better is a collection of 12 intriguing essays that look at doctors as people committed to saving the battlefield wounded, eradicating polio in India, inventively treating cystic fibrosis or making money, people confronted by complex moral and ethical issues and caught up in the intricacies and expectations of the medical insurance establishment. Gawande has an easy narrative style, mirrored here in John Bedford Lloyd's reading, that makes difficult medical situations intelligible. Like Groopman, he offers gripping stories of real people and weaves in his own experiences as a surgeon, experiences that have taught him that for a physician who sees himself as more than a "white-coated cog in a machine," the drive to do better, to do right by your patients in a very uncertain world, is a lifelong pursuit. I prescribe both of these audios—they're as close to a cure for medical misunderstanding as you'll find.