If, like me, you are a veteran of several book clubs, you will know two things:
1. The best books to discuss are the ones that provoke heated disagreement and
2. The best book groups are the ones where people come from different walks of life.
And so I was not disappointed when a group of inter-disciplinary scholars at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing – where I am currently a visiting fellow – sat down to discuss Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End.
For those who’ve not read Gawande’s best-seller, Being Mortal is a book about how people age – and die – in 21st century America. Gawande comes to this topic as a surgeon who treats people with terminal illness, a journalist chronicling the nature of elderly care the the United States, and the son of a father who died of cancer and had to help manage his father’s end-of life care. (You can read his impressive and multi-faceted bio here. Among other things, he delivered BBC Radio 4’s prestigious Reith Lectures on the future of medicine in 2014 here in the UK.)
What surprised me most about our discussion was that none of us could agree on what this book was really about.
Read the rest of this post over at the Oxford Institute for Population Ageing…
Image: Checking in with a Patient by Myfuture.com via Flickr
