Author Katy Butler describes Knocking on Heaven’s Door as “part memoir, part medical history, and part investigative journalism.” She is absolutely right, and this carefully arranged braid of a book is stronger and more appealing than any single strand would be alone. Yet at bottom, it’s a deeply personal story.

Butler writes heartrendingly about the death of her father, whose health began to deteriorate when he had a mild stroke. In her view, his process of dying was unnecessarily prolonged due to a pacemaker. As her father’s health declines, Butler gets busy. She successfully lines up various kinds of support for her caregiving mother. She advocates for her father’s medical rights. And she loves him deeply, even as he changes before her eyes. Comparing her father to Tintern Abbey, the partially destroyed edifice that inspired Wordsworth, she writes, “he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.”

As Butler sought to understand what was happening to her father, she explored the history of the device ticking in his chest, sending steady signals to his heart. She became absorbed by the development of emergency medicine: how it changed the deaths of many Americans, cruelly prolonged life for others and led to our culture’s worship of quick technological fixes to medical crises.  She takes her father’s story as a case in point. By moving between the details of her family’s story to the larger cultural and medical context in which it takes place, Butler manages to make some astonishing arguments—arguments whose force often comes from following the money. She traces, in amazing specificity, how hospitals are encouraged to adopt a save-the-patient-at-all-costs attitude, without regard for the patient’s quality of life or quality of death. The person who really pays for this, she argues, is the patient and the often under-informed family.

In all, Butler argues persuasively for a major cultural shift in how we understand death and dying, medicine and healing. At the same time, she lays her heart bare, making this much more than ideological diatribe. Readers who are eager to get their own paperwork and wishes in order, or who are thinking about their aging loved ones with concern, or who simply care about how our culture deals with basic questions of life and death, should be sure to pick up this book. It is one we will be talking about for years to come.

To the End of June is a book about heartbreak. It's filled with tales about failed relationships; broken bonds between parents and children; attempts by foster parents to care for those lost children; the frequent, painful separations when those relationships fail. And even when the relationship does work, and a foster child does find a loving home, the child often carries into adulthood the emptiness of having lost his or her biological parents.

There are few silver linings in To the End of June. Author Cris Beam isn't out to paint a pretty picture. A gifted writer, Beam tells her tale in a short, staccato style. There is no need for flowery prose. The facts tell the story in a dynamic way, and Beam's rhythmic writing keeps the narrative flowing.

Here are some of those eye-opening facts: There are nearly 500,000 children in foster care in the United States. Up to $20 billion is spent annually on their health and management. Besides the inherent emotional scars of being separated from their biological parents, foster children are frequently shuttled from home to home and face a greater risk of suffering mental, physical and sexual abuse.

But it's the human stories Beam uncovers that bring the facts to life. Consider Oneida, 16, a half-Cuban, half-Italian girl from Brooklyn who moves in with a middle-class foster couple, only to disappear after refusing to follow the house rules. Or Noble, a crack baby adopted by a gay couple who provide the love and support to help him survive. Or Lei, a Chinese-American girl who makes it through foster care and graduates from an Ivy League school, only to struggle in adulthood because she never really knew her biological parents.

The shocking details about the foster care system and the compelling human stories make To the End of June an important book, one that sheds light on the lives of a half million children who are too often neglected and ignored.