To give you an idea of how much I liked this book, I finished it in a single 4.5 hour sitting while drinking $14 beverages at a local coffee shop. Before I started reading Better, I was already familiar with Author, Atul Gawande, from some of his essays in The New Yorker, where he is a regular contributor. To say Gawande is a gifted writer would truly be an understatement. His essays have been selected for the Best American Science Writing six times, and twice as the Best American Essays. His first book - Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science - was a National Book Award finalist in 2002. And in 2006, Gawande received the McArthur Award for his medical research and writing.

The book is a three part collection of essays on how doctors around the world work to be better. While each essay is focused on events in the medical profession, Gawande is able to write them in a way that resonates with any outside “endeavors that involve risk and responsibility.“ He inspires the reader - regardless of your profession or beliefs - to be better at every day tasks, invoking in you a heightened sense of awareness of the daily things you could improve upon.

The first part - Diligence - covers topics on washing hands, dealing with and containing polio outbreaks in India, and how doctors deal with injuries and casualties during the Iraq war. The overall theme through Diligence is how we can be more efficient, and the importance of improving process through, as you can guess, diligence.

Part two - Doing Right - describes some of the difficult ethical issues that doctors have to face, be aware of, and work through. Topics range from medical malpractice, discomfort of nudity while working with patients of the opposite sex, physician involvement in the death penalty, the problems with the business of medicine, and issues concerning doctors fighting to save lives (or let patients die).

The third part - Ingenuity - was the best (in my opinion of course) section. Simply put, Gawande emphasizes the importance on the “willingness to recognize failure.” My favorite article - The Score - is a beautifully written essay on the miracle of birth and examines the Apgar Score and its effect on infant mortality rates. An excerpt from The Score is below:

At 5:00 A.M. on a cool Boston morning not long ago, Elizabeth Rourke - thick black-brown hair, pale Irish skin, and forty-one weeks pregnant - reached over and work her husband, Chris.

    “I’m having contractions,” she said.

    “Are you sure?” he asked.

    “I’m sure.”

She was a week past her due date, and the pain was deep and viselike, nothing like the occasional spasms she’d been feeling. It seemed to come out of her lower back and to wrap around and seize her whole abdomen. The first spasm woke her out of sound sleep. The second came. And a third.

Better is an intriguing insight into the medical world, and Gawande’s talent for breaking down complex issues relevant to all of us, make it a great read. He is fair in his arguments when discussing heated issues surrounding our litigious society, portraying the views of family and doctors equally. For me, the book has helped me totry old things in new ways. It’s so easy and natural for us to continually do things out of habit, never entertaining the thought that there may be a better, more efficient, or ethical way of performing our daily tasks.

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One of the essay originally published in the New Yorker:

The Bell Curve: What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?