If you aren’t currently among the more than 46 million Americans over the age of 65, with any luck, someday you will be. That’s why geriatric physician Louise Aronson’s Elderhood, a passionate, deeply informed critique of how our healthcare system fails in its treatment of the elderly, is such a vitally important book.

As Aronson explains, American medicine is reluctant to acknowledge old age as a distinct stage of life—one with unique medical challenges but hardly lacking in opportunities for deep fulfillment. Whether it’s the failure, until this year, of pharmaceutical trials to test drugs on elderly subjects, resulting in unanticipated side effects, or the tendency to view the final years of an elderly person’s life only through the lens of illness and disability, our perspective is both shortsighted and flawed. 

Another more profound flaw, Aronson argues, is our medical establishment’s stubborn insistence on treating organs and diseases rather than whole human beings, often prizing science and technology over simple, compassionate care. These efforts typically trigger costly late-life interventions that may be successful in the narrowest sense, prolonging life for a time but often inflicting physical and psychological pain on their recipients that severely compromises their quality of life. Aronson advocates for a new care paradigm, focused on the “optimization of health and well-being,” even when an earlier death may be the consequence. 

Elderhood shares some of its DNA with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. But unlike the well-known surgeon, Aronson brings to bear some three decades of geriatric practice, a branch of medicine that didn’t even emerge as a specialty in the U.S. until 1978. She draws extensively on case histories, including moving stories about her father’s final days and her mother’s resilience in facing the challenges of old age. Aronson, who holds a master’s degree in creative writing, is as comfortable drawing on resources outside the field of medicine, quoting poet Donald Hall or novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, as she is parsing a scientific study. Though the subject of this provocative book is the elderly, its message touches the entire span of human life.

When an admired writer dies, one consolation is that his passing doesn’t necessarily mean the end of his appearance in print. Happily, that’s true of prominent neurologist Oliver Sacks, who’s been gone since 2015. Sacks has left behind Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, a collection of 34 pieces, some of them previously unpublished—a reminder of the breadth of his professional expertise and the depth of his personal passions.

Admirers of Sacks’ previous books, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, will most enjoy the section titled “Clinical Tales.” In these essays, Sacks revisits some of the subjects of the medical case studies for which he’s best known: the way neurological disorders can alter dreams in striking ways, or whether out-of-body and near-death experiences are hallucinations or divine visions.

But Sacks doesn’t confine himself to tinkering with his previous work. “The Catastrophe” sensitively recounts the tragic story of his patient, actor and writer Spalding Gray, who committed suicide some two years after suffering a head injury in a car accident. “Cold Storage” is the bizarre tale of a man Sacks calls “Uncle Toby,” who gradually slipped into a comatose state where he remained, unmoving (and unmoved by his family), for seven years. Sacks offers encouragement in his essay “The Aging Brain,” as well as terror in “Kuru,” a brief survey of diseases collectively known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), the most familiar of them “mad cow disease.”

Sacks is equally appealing when he turns to more personal topics—including his love for gefilte fish and botanical gardens—which make up the book’s final section, “Life Continues.” This section takes its title from a touching piece he wrote only a short time before his death. In it he decries the “complete disappearance of the old civilities,” displayed daily in the way “a majority of the population is now glued without pause to their phones or other devices.” But Sacks, the quintessential humanist, maintains his optimism, fueled by a belief that “only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.” That aspiration and all the essays collected here are a fitting valedictory to Oliver Sacks’ fascinating life.

The sight of blood makes some people faint; for others, it’s just creepy. Yet it is essential—each adult human contains approximately nine pints of it. In her new book, Nine Pints, Rose George (The Big Necessity) discusses this life-giving substance in intricate detail.

George describes the busy, unrelenting job of this essential human body part that is “a tissue and an organ at once, and probably our most important organ.” She travels around the world, interviewing people whose lives have been impacted by blood in one way or another. She reports on a clinic in South Africa where residents can get tested and treated for HIV, a village in western Nepal where menstruating girls are shunned and must sleep in outdoor shacks, and a London trauma center that regularly treats code red (open chest) and code black (people with severe brain injury) patients.

Integrated in this narrative are a dizzying number of scientific facts and statistics, yet it is all very readable as George applies familiar comparisons. For example, when describing the job of helper T-cells (a type of white blood cell), she writes, “If the immune system were Star Wars, helper Ts would be the Force: they guide other white blood cells to attack invaders and threats.” Her use of statistics, such as the 12,000-mile journey traveled by each person’s red blood cells every day, helps give the reader perspective.

George tackles a squeamish subject in a manner that is eloquent and witty, making Nine Pints a factual, scientific book that reads like a novel with a colorful cast of characters ranging from medicinal leeches to groundbreaking scientists and innovative inventors.

This fascinating book will appeal to anyone interested in learning more about blood and its role as a wondrous, renewable human resource.

Imagine watching your father die slowly from a degenerative neurological disease so rare that there is no cure. Imagine, then, coming to grips when you learn the disease is genetic and there is a good chance that you carry those genes, and will not only die from the disease but pass it along to your children. If you could take a simple blood test to reveal whether or not you have the genes, would you take it?

Part medical mystery, part family history and part medical history, Gina Kolata’s gripping Mercies in Disguise: A Story of Hope, a Family’s Genetic Destiny, and the Science That Rescued Them tells the story of one small-town Southern family ravaged by a mysterious illness. The Baxley family of Hartsville, South Carolina, always felt they were special. They were even named the South Carolina Family of the Year in 1985 by former governor Richard Riley. Following family patriarch Bill Baxley’s death, they discovered their specialness arose not only from hard work and community respect but from carrying a rare disease that started to afflict almost every member of the family.

After watching her father die slowly from Gerstmann-­Sträussler-Scheinker (GSS) disease, Amanda Baxley, Bill Baxley’s granddaughter, tests positive for this degenerative illness that is plaguing her family. In poignant detail, Kolata tells of Amanda’s fear, hope, strength and courage as she chooses to undergo preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a procedure in which embryos with the disease are discarded while a healthy one is implanted. As a result of this procedure, Amanda delivers twins not long after her father breathes his last breath, and she sees her children as a gift of life from her father.

Kolata’s book tells a riveting tale of fear and fierce determination in the face of an overwhelming medical situation that at first seems hopeless.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

John Elder Robison is already well known for his 2007 memoir, Look Me in the Eye, which detailed his life as a successful adult with Asperger’s syndrome. A key feature of this bestseller, and of Robison’s stance toward Asperger’s in general, is that being on the autism spectrum is a gift rather than a disease. And so, when given the opportunity, why did he submit to a series of experimental brain treatments? This is one of the questions Robison struggles to answer in Switched On, his eloquent, vivid and utterly compelling new memoir.

Robison undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) because it might increase his emotional awareness, or so researchers predict. But his reaction to the treatments far exceeds their expectations. His experiences are hallucinogenic, highly charged and deeply meaningful. They change him forever. Readers see Robison in the throes of the treatments and their dramatic aftermath—staying up all night listening to music, reconsidering relationships, reveling in his ability to finally look people in the eye. These stories are so moving and unpredictable that I found myself reading them aloud. 

It’s been seven years since Robison initially underwent TMS, and the long-term implications are still unfolding. Ultimately, though, this book provides an intellectual and emotional initiation into a different way of perceiving the world. Like books by Andrew Solomon and Oliver Sacks, Switched On offers an opportunity to consider mental processes through a combination of powerful narrative and informative medical context. Readers can put their hands, for a moment, on the mystery that is the brain.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With an unsparing eye for all the details, Kevin Hazzard takes readers on a chaotic ride through a city’s crack houses and road carnage, a hospital’s turbulent mental health ward and still-smoldering scenes of domestic violence. In A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back, a gripping account of his 10 years “running” ambulance calls in Atlanta, Hazzard evolves from neophyte (terrified he might harm instead of help) to true believer (total professional) to burned-out paramedic wise enough to know it was time to quit.

There’s the patient who dies because medics allow him to walk to the ambulance instead of insisting he go on a stretcher. There’s the victim who loves his wife even though he ends up nailed to a wall (literally), and the baby born at a mere 23 weeks of gestation, whose beating heart is visible through his translucent skin. There’s this: Narcan really can raise the dead. And this: Firemen and medics can get in each other’s way.

Yet Hazzard is no gleeful voyeur; the respect he accords his patients and many—though not all—of his colleagues imparts a kind of honorable dignity to this work. “Lives are in the balance,” he says, “and it’s just us.” He admits his addiction to the adrenaline rush from an incoming call, senses when his empathy begins to feel more like apathy, and chooses to leave before he becomes what he calls a Killer, a medic indifferent to the fate of his patients.

Hazzard has been, in other words, just the kind of human being you hope would come to your rescue. His story may well inspire others to take a chance on this vital but often overlooked vocation.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With 3.5 million nurses in the United States, they are the country’s largest group of healthcare providers. So it’s not surprising that after investigating sororities, geeks, overachievers and more, award-winning journalist Alexandra Robbins has turned her attention to The Nurses.

After interviewing hundreds, Robbins narrowed her focus to the personal narratives of four nurses. Although the author relies on pseudonyms and doesn’t identify the names of their hospitals or their locations, their stories are compelling in every way.

While undergoing fertility treatments, “Molly” quits her job at a hospital that treats nurses horribly and signs on with a nursing agency to seek out better working environments. A real-life Nurse Jackie, “Lara” is a highly skilled nurse who accidentally became addicted to narcotics while on the job. “Juliette” is an ER nurse who feels ostracized by a group of clique-y nurses. “Sam” is beginning her career and learning to navigate the ropes, with her first-day mantra being “Just don’t kill anyone.”

Interspersed with these narratives are discussions of nurse bullying, sex, on-the-job injuries, burnout, drug issues, heroism and more. There are horrific anecdotes (a nurse is ordered to keep working after being attacked by a patient, and ends up with a fractured neck), as well as heartwarming moments (Molly wheels a dying man and his wife of 68 years to watch their last sunrise together).

Robbins concludes by offering remedies for the many problems nurses encounter, with suggestions for what patients, families, nurses and aspiring nurses can do to make things better.

RELATED CONTENT: Read an interview with author Alexandra Robbins.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What makes Rob Dunn’s narrative history of advances in heart research so fascinating is on vivid display in the opening chapter of The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Here Dunn tells the story of a Chicago surgeon who performed the first-known repair to the pericardium, the protective sac around the heart. The year was 1893, and Chicago was abuzz over the World’s Fair. The patient, a railroad worker, had been stabbed in a knife fight at a local bar. The surgeon, a talented, ambitious African-American man, had been forced by racial prejudice to found his own poorly funded hospital, serving Chicago’s lower class. At a time when a knife to the heart was almost always fatal, the revolutionary procedure was delicate and complex because there was no technology to sustain the heart while a surgeon worked on it. To everyone’s amazement, the procedure succeeded.

There, in a nutshell, is the enticing weave of biography, social history and heart-related scientific drama that will entice and satisfy readers throughout the book.

From this opening, Dunn relates many fascinating stories, ranging from Leonardo DaVinci’s contributions to our understanding of the heart to the complexities of developing the heart-lung machine. The book takes its title from an experiment by Werner Forssmann, an ambitious surgeon wonderfully described as “more forearm than frontal lobe,” who, in a dangerous stunt, inserted a catheter in his arm, running it all the way to his heart, an exploit that eventually earned him a Nobel Prize.

Dunn, a biology professor and widely published popular writer on science, says we are far more ignorant about the workings of the heart than we think, and there is much more to learn. That is undoubtedly true, but for a general reader, Dunn’s book is a great contribution to our understanding of the lifelong work of our beating hearts.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.