Nowhere is the drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. Atul Gawande’s gripping stories take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, delivery rooms in Boston, a polio outbreak in India, and malpractice courtrooms in the US. He discusses the ethical dilemma of lethal injections, examines the influence of money on modern medicine, and recounts the contentious history of hand-washing. And as in all his writing, he gives us an inside look at his own life as a surgeon.

Atul Gawande is the author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health system innovation, and Chairman of Lifebox, a charity making surgery safer globally. He lives with his wife and three children in Newton, Massachusetts.