Insomniac city - Bill Hayes

Of human bondage - W. Somerset Maugham

When breath becomes air - Paul Kalanithi

The dark tunnel - Ross Macdonald

Do no harm - Henry Marsh

Do no harm: stories of life, death, and brain surgery - Marsh, Henry

Summary: "Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached surgeons, this ... brutally honest account will make you think again"--Amazon.com.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Brain surgery is risky business, even with modern technology—paralysis, stroke, and bleeding are devastating complications. Little wonder that the first chapter in this amazing account of an English neurosurgeon's three-decade career begins, "I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing." He works on cerebral aneurysms, head trauma, brain hemorrhage, ruptured discs of the spine, and loads of brain tumors. His instruments are crude (bone drill, wire saw, small scalpel) and sophisticated (operating microscope, Computer Navigation GPS for the brain). Marsh reflects on professional detachment, uncertainty, intense anxiety, shame, and fallibility. Breaking bad news to patients and witnessing so much misery is draining. Sometimes the most important decision he makes is to do nothing: not to operate. He recounts successful cases (an operation on a young pregnant woman who was going blind due to a meningioma) and failures (surgeries gone very badly). He writes about the necessity of kindness and honesty from doctors and the difficult balance between hope and reality. Marsh remains fascinated by the brain: how "mere brute matter can give rise to consciousness" and "the electrochemical chatter of one hundred billion nerve cells." One of the best books ever about a life in medicine, Do No Harm boldly and gracefully exposes the vulnerability and painful privilege of being a physician. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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On the move: a life - Oliver Sacks

On the move: a life - Sacks, Oliver

Summary: When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: "Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far." Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life. Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions -- weight lifting and swimming -- also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists -- Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick -- who influenced him.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Sacks characterizes himself primarily as a storyteller, the son of storytellers—mother and father both—rather than as a physician, the other identity he shares with both parents. He's melded those roles in a string of best-selling collections of case histories from his practice as a clinical neurologist. Anyone pleased by any of them will be enthralled with his own story, which he fills out with not just the personal reasons, such as making fascinating friends, but also the scientific ones, such as contributing to new conceptions of brain function, that make what he tells us worth telling. He also, perhaps all unawares, reveals himself as a restless achiever and a bit of a daredevil. If avidly reading historic medical literature from adolescence on seems entirely appropriate to a writing clinician, surely youthful passions for motorcycling and weightlifting (on early-'60s Muscle Beach, yet) are a bit surprising (when injuries quashed those pursuits, Sacks fell back on hard swimming and scuba diving). And if strong late friendships with the stars of brain research seem inevitable, others begun well before he was famous, such as with the poets W. H. Auden and Thom Gunn, attest the estheticism in him that is the mainspring of his 2007 best-seller, Musicophilia. That Sacks is homosexual barely glints among the other lights of his long, eventful life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: That the author's previous books have been popular in libraries should more than suggest that most public librarians need to have this new one in their collection. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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The tiger's wife - Tea Obreht

The tiger's wife - Obreht, Tea

Summary: Struggling to understand why his beloved grandfather left his family to die alone in a field hospital far from home, a young doctor in a war-torn Balkan country takes over her grandfather's search for a mythical ageless vagabond while referring to a worn copy of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book."



Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Not even Obreht's place on the New Yorker's current "20 under 40" list of exceptional writers will prepare readers for the transporting richness and surprise of this gripping novel of legends and loss in a broken land. Drawing on the former Yugoslavia's fabled past and recent bloodshed, Belgrade-born Obreht portrays two besieged doctors. Natalia is on an ill-advised "good will" medical mission at an orphanage on what is suddenly the "other side," now that war has broken out, when she learns that her grandfather, a distinguished doctor forced out of his practice by ethnic divides, has died far from home. She is beset by memories, particularly of her grandfather taking her to the zoo to see the tigers. We learn the source of his fascination in mesmerizing flashbacks, meeting the village butcher, the deaf-mute Muslim woman he married, and a tiger who escaped the city zoo after it was bombed by the Germans. Of equal mythic mystery is the story of the "deathless man." Moments of breathtaking magic, wildness, and beauty are paired with chilling episodes in which superstition overrides reason; fear and hatred smother compassion; and inexplicable horror rules. Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance. Copyright 2011 Booklist Reviews.

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