BEST Atul Gawande Books & Quotes of All Time (March 2023)

by Arthur Worsley
M.A. Psychology, Oxford. McKinsey Alum. Founder & Editor at TAoL.

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Contents

1. Who Is Atul Gawande?

2. The Best Atul Gawande Books of All Time

3. More Books Like Atul Gawande's Books

4. Best Atul Gawande Quotes

5. Wish There Was a Faster/Easier Way?

Who Is Atul Gawande?

Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, professor and public health researcher. He specializes in general and endocrine surgery and has written extensively in both publications and best-selling books on medicine and public health.

Learn more about Atul Gawande

The Best Atul Gawande Books of All Time

Why these best Atul Gawande books and not others? To stay objective, I rank all my book recommendations by a combination of what’s most loved (Goodreads rating), what’s most popular (Goodreads review count) and what’s proven timlessly relevant (first publication date).

This isn’t a whimsical list. It’s a data-driven, crowdsourced collection of the best Atul Gawande books ever published as decided by book lovers like you.

And if you think something's missing? I LOVE book recommendations so if there are any other books by Atul Gawande that you think deserve mentioning, email me and I’ll be sure to include them in the next round of updates.

Until then, here are the best Atul Gawande books of all time...

1. Being Mortal - Atul Gawande (FREE Summary)

Medicine and What Matters in the End

Being Mortal is a powerful examination of how treating ageing and terminal disease as purely extend-life-at-all-costs medical problems is destroying the final moments of our lives - by surgeon and best selling author, Atul Gawande.

Published 2014 // 282 pages // Rated 4.4 over 154,600 reviews on Goodreads

2. Complications - Atul Gawande

A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science

Published 2002 // 270 pages // Rated 4.2 over 44,900 reviews on Goodreads

3. Better - Atul Gawande

A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

Published 2007 // 288 pages // Rated 4.2 over 30,000 reviews on Goodreads

Best Atul Gawande Books: The Checklist Manifesto

4. The Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawande (FREE Summary)

How to Get Things Right

The Checklist Manifesto is a fascinating investigation into the ability of checklists in business, medicine and every day life to promote greater efficiency, consistency and safety - by surgeon and public health researcher, Atul Gawande.

Published 2009 // 208 pages // Rated 4.0 over 59,100 reviews on Goodreads

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Best Atul Gawande Quotes

Here are some of the best Atul Gawande of all time...

"In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?"

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

Best Atul Gawande Quotes: You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

"How we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death - losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, “Old age is a continuous series of losses.” Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”"

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

"Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you."

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal

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