In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and maintain life amid chaos. After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several of those caregivers faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.
Five Days at Memorial , the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing. In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better.
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A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis. She is a correspondent at the… More about Sheri Fink. Fink more than delivers. She writes with a seasoned sense of how doctors and nurses improvise in emergencies, and about the ethical realms in which they work. The first half of this book, which is well paced, covers the five days of the title.
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
Then the viewfinder shifts to an entwined legal and political story in which state authorities pursue a homicide investigation. That so many people, starkly divided over the question of whether crimes had been committed, come off as decent and appealing makes this book an absorbing read. Fink brings a shimmering intelligence to its many narrative cul-de-sacs, which consider medical, legal and ethical issues….
By reporting the depth of those gruesome hours in Memorial before the helicopters came, and giving weight to medical ethics as grounded in the law, Sheri Fink has written an unforgettable story. Five Days at Memorial is social reporting of the first rank.
Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
Her work won a Pulitzer Prize. And now comes the book.
Fink also expands on the ethical conundrums, which have festered over time and seem to gain fresh urgency. But she does deliver an amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, by Sheri Fink, review
Fink has written a compelling and revealing account. Pulitzer-Prize-winning Sheri Fink, who is also a physician and a former relief worker in combat zones, lays out every shred of evidence, but leaves the final judgment to the reader. Anyone interested in Hurricane Katrina, human behavior in times of crisis, or medical ethics should read it. Her reporting is detailed, nuanced and far-reaching, yet it is never biased—a stunning accomplishment in a story with this kind of moral complexity. Five Days at Memorial treats the chain of events at the hospital as a microcosm that raises vital and increasingly relevant questions about end-of-life care, and the ethics of euthanasia in extraordinary circumstances.
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