Atul Gawande Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Best American Science Writing Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Atul Gawande is a public health leader, author, and acclaimed surgeon.

Before he became a member of the COVID-19 Advisory Board under Joe Biden, he used to be employed as a doctor in several places.

He was a Harvard Medical School professor and a practicing endocrine and general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Atul is also the chair and founder of the joint center for health systems innovation, “Ariadne Labs,” and the nonprofit organization “Lifebox,” which was founded to improve the safety of surgery across the globe.

Gawande is also a co-founder of a public benefit organization founded to provide support for pandemic response across the United States named “CIC Health.”

He has also worked as the CEO of the healthcare venture Haven which is a collaboration between JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon.

In addition, Atul has written for the New Yorker Magazine as a staff writer and penned several New York Times bestselling titles.

For his work, he has been admitted into the National Academy of Medicine and won the Lewis Thomas Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the AcademyHealth’s Impact Award.

Gawande was born in Brooklyn New York in 1965 to Indian immigrants both of whom were practicing doctors.

While he was born in New York, the family relocated to Athens, Ohio where he went to high school, and upon graduation, he went to Stanford to study political science and biology.

He would then get an economics, politics, and philosophy masters from Balliol College Oxford. In 1995, he graduated from Harvard Medical School with a Doctor of Medicine.

Over the years, he has been very active in politics and started volunteering for Gary Hart while he was still in college. He has also worked in the campaigns of the like of Al Gore in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 1992.

When Bill Clinton won the presidency, he was employed as a senior advisor in the Department of Human and Health Services. He also led several reform task forces but later described his time working for the government as frustrating.

Gawande worked for the World Health Organization and in the process was heavily involved in the production of a surgery checklist to be used across the globe.

The checklist was meant to improve and stimulate communication among teams to enhance the safety of patients’ care.

Soon after graduating from college, Atul Gawande embarked on his residency. It was while he was doing his residency that “Slate” editor Jacob Weisberg who was his friend invited him to contribute to the magazine.

Over the years, he penned many interesting articles for the likes of “Slate” and the “New Yorker” that garnered a lot of attention.

Gawande’s “New Yorker” essay compared the costs of health care between two Texan towns and argued that the more expensive one was due to a profit-maximizing culture.

The article is believed to have inspired President Barack Obama and his healthcare reform agenda. “How Do We Heal Medicine,” his 2012 TED talk became one of that year’s most popular TED talks and has now been viewed more than 2 million times
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Atul Gawande published “Complications” his debut novel in 2002 and the work went on to become a finalist for the National Book Award.

The work was a compilation of more than a dozen articles that he had penned for The New Yorker and Slate over the years.

Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal” is a novel about how to die on one’s own terms. According to the author, the medical world has for centuries been wrong about how it provides treatment to people who are dying.

Gawande believes that medicine ought not to be all about ensuring survival and health, but rather about control over one’s life, a sense of purpose dying with dignity and quality of life.

Treatment needs to be about people writing the final chapter of their lives without any encumbrance. They need to be able to control their well-being in the sense of how they wish to spend their last moments of life.

People who are in treatment need to be offered the choice between emergency room care and going to a hospice. While it does seem like an unpleasant topic it could not be more relevant in today’s world.

To write the book, Atul conducted a series of interviews with the terminally ill and with seniors and asked them what meant the most to them.

He found out that there were things they were willing to sacrifice and some they were not in the quest to extend their lives just a little while longer.

By examining the treatment of the dying to the traditional, cultural institutionalized view, he provides some alternative insights into how we ought to treat the dying.

“The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande is a work that asserts the truism that we live in a world of increasing complexity.

This is a world in which even the best professionals cannot master the tasks they face. Even with advanced technology, longer training experts still commit some grievous errors.

However, Gawande the acclaimed author and surgeon has found a remedy using the simplest and most humble of techniques; the checklist.

This is a tool that was initially introduced in the American Air Force to ensure pilots fly with significantly enhanced predictability even when their fly planes with mind-boggling sophistication.

Making use of riveting stories, the author shows how the simple checklist may be the game changer nurses and doctors need to respond to anything from avalanches to flu epidemics.

Even in surgery which is one of the most complex medical fields, a simple checklist can cut fatalities by more than 33 percent.

From saving a drowning victim in Michigan to intensive care units eliminating deadly infections, he shows how checklists can strike immediate and significant improvements.

Atul Gawande’s “Complications” is a work that will make its readers question expertise. The author shows that doctors can no longer be doctors when they stop treating their patients with utmost care and fastidiousness.

Even doctors can be subject to the many issues ordinary people have to deal with such as depression and alcoholism.

He candidly tells of how he learned the ropes, fumbling and being tentative in the beginning as he recounts the many mistakes he made during that time.

Most of all, this is a work about surrender and honesty as Gawande illustrates the complexities and dualities of being a surgeon who has to make death or life decisions.

While scientific research is always playing its part in advancing medicine, there will always be a factor of randomness and uncertainty which is difficult to surmount using hard facts.

He asserts that in the making of difficult decisions which may determine a person’s life for years to come, it is incumbent upon the surgeon to guide them on how the procedure will change their life.