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Medical Nonfiction Stars

Nonfiction about disease, illness, doctors, nurses, all aspects of health care, drugs, etc. Specific conditions/diseases may have separate booklists.

• The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It
  Author: Angell, Marcia
  Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 0375508465 Date: 2004
  LJ PW
  During her two decades at "The New England Journal of Medicine", Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes the shocking truth of what the pharmaceutical industry has become - and argues for essential, long-overdue change. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 8.2.04
• Hope in Hell: The World of Doctors Without Borders
  Author: Bortolotti, Dan
  Publisher: Firefly $ 29.95 ISBN: 1552978656 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, delivers emergency aid around the world. This book tells its history and examines the lives of individual volunteers. Topics range from emergency surgery in war zones to witnessing atrocities.
  Updated 10.4.04
• Hot Lights, Cold Steel: True Stories From a Surgeon's First Years
  Author: Collins, Michael J.
  Publisher: St Martins $ 24.95 ISBN: 03123337787 Date: 2005
  Booklist
  This story of Collins' four-year surgical residency traces his rise from an eager but clueless first-year resident to accomplished chief resident in his final year. With unparalleled humor, he recounts the disparity between people's perceptions of a doctor's glamorous life and the real thing.
  Updated 12.6.04
• Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Transforming American Lives, Minds and Bodies
  Author: Critser, Greg
  Publisher: Houghton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0618393137 Date: 2005
  LJ
  Greg Critser's brilliantly incisive Generation Rx moves the conversation about prescription drugs to where it hits home: our own bodies. The book encourages every American who has ever taken a prescription drug to look anew at what's in the medicine cabinet, and why.
  Updated 8.24.05
• Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life With Alzheimer's
  Author: Debaggio, Thomas
  Publisher: Free $ 24 ISBN: 0743205650 Date: 2002
  LJ
  This intensely intimate and moving account of a 57-year-old writer afflicted with the early onset of Alzheimer's disease is a work, like Tuesdays with Morrie, that paints a vivid picture of memory--and the pain that comes from its loss. A rare, historic, and profoundly important chronicle of Alzheimer's, this is a book where the author is also the disease's victim.
  Updated 2.18.02
• Dangerous Doses: The Tainting of Our Most Powerful Medicines
  Author: Eban, Katherine
  Publisher: Harcourt $ 25 ISBN: 0151010501 Date: 2005
  Kirkus
  In the tradition of the great investigative classics, Dangerous Doses exposes the dark side of America's pharmaceutical trade. With the conscience of a crusading reporter, Eban has crafted a riveting narrative that shows how, when the public most needs protection, it may be most at risk.
  Updated 3.10.05
• Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death from the ER
  by Grim Pamela
  Publisher: Warner $ 23.95 ISBN: 0446524239 Date: 2000
  Kirkus
  A doctor shares her experiences in the life-and-death theater of the emergency room in this exquisitely rendered, insightful, and heartbreaking work. Dr. Grimm has worked all over the world, caring for victims of gang life in America's inner cities, victims of the war in Bosnia, poverty-stricken patients in Nigeria, and bank presidents in the United States.
  
• Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
  Author: Gawande, Atul
  Publisher: Metropolitan $ 24 ISBN: 0805063196 Date: 2002
  Kirkus
  A book about medicine that reads like a thriller, Complications is "a uniquely soulful book about the science of mending bodies" (Adam Gopnik, author of From Paris to the Moon).
  Updated 3.14.02
• The Dressing Station: A Surgeon's Chronicle of War and Medicine
  Author: Kaplan, Jonathan
  Publisher: Grove $ 25 ISBN: 0802117074 Date: 2002
  PW
  The Dressing Station is a searing portrait of devastation on the battlefield--a haunting and elucidating look into the nature of human violence, the shattering contradictions of war, and the complicated role of medicine in this modern world.
  Updated 11.27.01
• And a Time To Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life
  Author: Kaufman, Sharon R.
  Publisher: Scribner $ 28 ISBN: 0743264762 Date: 2005
  PW LJ
  A penetrating examination of how most Americans die today--how the patients and their families' conflicting desires about a "good death" collide with the politics and routines of American hospitals.
  Suggested Reading: Six Feet Under
  Updated 3.11.05
• Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio
  Author: Kluger, Jeffrey
  Publisher: Putnam $ 25.95 ISBN: 158567592x Date: 2005
  Booklist LJ PW
  Kluger reveals the thrilling story of Jonas Salk's quest to conquer polio in this medical adventure full of rivalries and last minute reversals that culminated in one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars
  Updated 2.15.05
• Against Depression
  Author: Kramer, Peter D.
  Publisher: Viking $ 25.95 ISBN: 0670034053 Date: 2005
  LJ PW
  A decade ago, with his breakaway bestseller Listening to Prozac, Kramer revolutionized the way the public thinks about antidepressants and the culture in which they are so widely used. Now, he returns with a profound and original look at the condition those medications treat--depression.
  Updated 4.7.05
• Severed Trust: Why American Medicine Hasn't Been Fixed
  by Lundberg, George
  Publisher: Basic $ 26 ISBN:0465042910 Date: 2001
  Kirkus
  In this no-holds-barred book, Lundberg, editor-in-chief of medical journal Medscape, speaks out on the crisis in contemporary medicine. He charges that organized medicine has become an overbuilt political-industrial complex with disastrous results. His analysis of greedy doctors, profit-hungry drug companies, and a corrupted AMA is certain to provoke controversy and stimulate debate.
  
  
• The Killers Within: the Deadly Rise of Drug-Resisant Bacteria
  Author: Shnayerson, Michael
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.95 ISBN: 0316713317 Date: 2002
  Kirkus
  A battle is taking place on the frontiers of medicine between rapidly evolving bacteria and the doctors struggling to outwit them. The Killers Within tells this horror story that just happens to be true.
  Updated 8.28.02
• As I Live and Breathe: Notes of a Patient Doctor
  Author: Weisman, Jamie
  Publisher: North Point $ 23 ISBN: 0865476020 Date: 2002
  Booklist
  In this probing and inspiring book, Dr. Weisman offers a view of medicine from both sides of the trenches, embracing the patientUs fervent desire for health and the doctor's fervent desire to grant it.
  Updated 6.30.02