Complications
In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is―uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.
Stats for nerds
14recommend
21mentions
21people
2009–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Complications and Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. Made me appreciate modern medicine more. One other l book that shifted my thinking completely about AI and how far we are from AGI: A Brief History Of Intelligence by Max Bennett. Evolution is a heck of an algorithm.
Also read Apple In China. Was pretty interesting to realize how much Apple (and China) are what they are because of how much they poured into each other
- I would also add Complications to that list. As a former life sciences researcher, I've loved everything that Atul Gawande has written.
- And I'll add Atul Gawande's “Better” and “Complications” on general surgery in particular and medicine in general.
- Non-fiction I read this year:
Michael Benson - Space Odyssey - The detailed story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're a fan of the movie, or of Stanley Kubrick and/or Arthur C. Clarke in general, you should read this.
Atul Gawande - Complications - Fascinating look at life in the medical profession.
Christina Thompson - Sea People - Detailed, well-researched history of Polynesian-Western contact and relations. As a New Zealander I was interested in this, although American or European readers with no personal connection may be less so.
Peter Singer - Marx: A Very Short Introduction - What it says on the tin.
Robert C Allen - Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction - Also good, but inaccurately titled; it should have said "Global Economic History Since the Industrial Revolution".
Fraser A Sherman - Now and Then We Time Travel - A thorough if somewhat superficial survey of time travel in the movies.
Alec Nevala-Lee - Astounding - A history of the magazine Astounding Stories, and the four men most closely associated with it: John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ron Hubbard. Very thoroughly researched and annotated; it reveals a lot of new information and debunks a lot of old myths. (Whichever version of the "FBI visits Campbell to complain about A-bomb stories" you've heard, I can pretty much guarantee it wasn't the real one.)
Elizabeth Sandifer - Tardis Eruditorum 1: William Hartnell - The first volume of a thorough study of Doctor Who, with a combined fannish and scholarly point of view that I enjoyed.
Randall Munroe - How To - It's by Randall Munroe, what else do you need to know?
- I've read most of Atul Gawande's books about the medical industry (Better, Complications, and The Checklist Manifesto) and I found the three of them extremely relevant to my career as a computer scientist. The latter book is by far his most famous, but IMHO the other two are much better.
This is a bold choice by Amazon, but it seems like a good idea even if it's just for name recognition.
- Not necessarily related, but having read several of Atul Gawande's books, I would highly recommend them. I think they all address about how to at least attempt to eliminate some errors from any workflow. (Though, I may be biased with some background in the Pharmaceutical field.)
I personally would recommend "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science"[1] , mainly because I like that he briefly addresses how it's sometimes hard to quantify knowing that something will go wrong, and that you almost have to acquire experience/a gut instinct of when to go the extra mile.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Complications-Surgeons-Notes-Imperfec...
