A Bounty of Books

Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink covers the five days (and the ensuing fallout) that elapsed between Hurricane Katrina's landfall and when the last living person was evacuated from Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in 2005. Sheri Fink is a journalist who also holds an M.D. which gives her the background to intelligently cover complicated medical matters. She does this phenomenally in Five Days at Memorial.

The first part of the book briefly mentions Memorial Medical Center's history, short biographies of the main players, and the preparations for and actual landfall of Hurricane Katrina. The rest of the section recounts what happened day by day as the staff struggled both to take care of patients in continuously deteriorating conditions as well as get everyone to safety. Using interviews, transcripts of official documents, and many other first person sources, Fink tells the story through a variety of people's perspectives. Both events and mindsets are discussed. Though one can never truly know what it was like to be there without having lived through it, Fink successfully conveys the sense of desperation that enveloped not just the hospital, but the city of New Orleans during this time.

The rest of the book details the investigation that took place into the deaths of about twenty of the forty-five patients that died during the covered five days. Fink details not just the events, but again the mindset and motivations of the major players, including the investigators, coroner, lawyers, and those three professionals who were eventually arrested. Fink does a masterful job of helping the reader understand the struggle each of these people went through regarding their role in this process. For many of them, it was life consuming.

Five Days at Memorial doesn't offer any tidy conclusions or opinions. Fink presents the available information, providing appropriate context, and lets the reader decide. I changed my mind at least half a dozen times as various perspectives and facts were presented. Five Days at Memorial does exactly what a great non-fiction book should do: it allows the reader to be in the situation as much as possible, and then lets him draw his own conclusions. I would thoroughly recommend Five Days at Memorial to anyone interested in medical ethics, disasters, Hurricane Katrina, or just a well written current event story.

Blogging for Books provided this book to me for free in exchange for an honest review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255