Being Mortal

In Being Mortal, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande looks at how people live with age-related frailty, serious illness and approaching death, and at how modern medicine often fails them. He moves through assisted living, nursing homes, hospice and palliative care, and draws on patients he has treated and on his own father's final illness. Two chapters grew out of essays first published in The New Yorker.

His argument is that doctors are trained to fight for survival and are poor at the harder conversation about what a person most wants from the time they have left. Gawande makes the case for care that protects independence, dignity and quality of life, and for asking patients and families what they fear and hope for before a crisis forces a decision. First published in October 2014, the book won the Royal Society of Biology General Book Prize and inspired a PBS Frontline documentary.