Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
I really can't understand the lack of love for this category. Three days in and only three nominations (two of which are mine). Well, here are some suggestions for consideration (Note that I'm not giving the nod to any one of them in this post):
• Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior by Leonard Mlodinow
2013 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
260 pages
• Why Does E=mc2? by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books
264 pages
• The Secrets of Consciousness by Scientific American Editors
180 pages
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?
469 pages
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Oh, I've got love for the category, just been busy and was waiting a day or two to add my second nomination.
I'd like to nominate
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande.
Amazon description:
In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.
Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.
Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.
The book is 300 pages long, and bit over what I'd like to spend, at $12.99, but it comes highly recommended by my DW and is certainly different than my other nomination.
Amazon: $12.99
Audible: 19.83 or 1 credit
Kobo CA: $14.99
Overdrive