Non-Fiction Book Club to discuss "Being Mortal" by Atul Gawande - Thursday, August 4 - 6:30PM

Pollard Library Non-Fiction book club meets on the first Thursday of every month at 6:30PM in the ground floor meeting room. Our group is free and open to the public. Copies of books up for discussion are available for patrons to borrow on a first come first serve basis at the 1st Floor Information Desk. You may also reserve a copy by calling the Community Planning Department at 978-674-1542. For more information about this group please contact Sean Thibodeau, Coordinator of Community Planning, at sthibodeau@LowellLibrary.org or 978-674-1542.

From Book Jacket:

“Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing t manageable. but when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over food they are allowed to eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them. And families go along with all of it.
In his bestselling books, Atul Gawande, a practicing surgeon, has fearlessly revealed the struggles of his profession. Now he examines its ultimate limitations and failures—in his own practices as well as others’—as life draws to a close. And he discovers how we can do better. He follows a hospice nurse on her rounds, a geriatrician in his clinic, and reformers turning nursing homes upside down. He finds people who show us how to have the hard conversations and how to ensure we never sacrifice what people really care about.
Riveting, honest, and humane, Being Mortal, shows how the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life—all the way to the very end.

About the Author:

Atul Gawande is the author of three bestselling books: Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, and The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. 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 for 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 the director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.