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Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL

Sheri Fink

Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Sheri Fink's astounding and award-winning non-fiction account of what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in August 2005 when Hurricane Katrina made landfall and devastated the city.
In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and maintain life amid chaos.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several of those caregivers faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are for the impact of large-scale disasters - and how we can do better. A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.

Sheri Fink is the New York Times bestselling author of Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital and War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival. She is a correspondent at The New York Times, where her and her colleagues' stories on the West Africa Ebola crisis were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, the George Polk Award for health reporting, and the Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award. Her story "The Deadly Choices at Memorial," co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, received a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and a National Magazine Award for reporting. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, Fink received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.
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Published 2013-09-10 by Broadway Books / Crown

Comments

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL is ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Entertainment Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star

FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL is the WINNER of: National Book Critics Circle Award, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ; PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award ; Los Angeles Times Book Prize ; Ridenhour Book Prize ; American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award ; National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award

An amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.

This August, Apple TV has released internationally the first 8-episode season of the tv mini-series based on Sheri Fink's book. Additional seasons are planned to follow the aftermath of the hurricane.

Based on actual events from Hurricane Katrina. When the floodwaters rose, power failed, and heat soared, exhausted caregivers at a New Orleans hospital were forced to make profound, heart-wrenching decisions. Starring Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones, Cornelius Smith Jr. Read more...

China: Shanghai Translation Publishing House ; France: Editions du Seuil ; Japan: Kadokawa ; Korea: RH Korea ; Russia: AST