Atul Gawande’s book—by practicing surgeon and a well-known popularizer of science—is a brilliant, bold, and incredibly compelling account of a doctor’s daily life, one who deals with life and death every day and has to make decisions in situations where science is unreliable, information is limited, and the stakes are a person’s life. Telling touching, piercing stories from his practice, the author speaks openly about serious problems and limitations of modern medicine; about the mysteries of the human body; about how good doctors become bad; about the successes and failures of a surgeon’s work; about medical mistakes—and about what a happiness it is when you manage to save a patient’s life.