Book recomendations

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Been reading my ass off for the past few months and wanted to suggest another series for those wanting some not-so-medical-school books.

Go and pick up "A Game of Thrones" by George RR Martin. It's the first of 7 planned novels (he's currently working on the 5th), and imo is better on the whole than Lord of the Rings. Three major plot lines, countless characters, shocking twists, and a blurred line between good vs evil as seen from the pov of different characters = 👍
 
Have read The House of God and it is one of my all time favorites (if you couldn't tell from my sig). I also love all of Dr. Atul Gawande's books: Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto.

Another one that I highly recommend is Waking Up in America, it is the autobiography of Dr. Pedro Jose Greer who has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his advocacy on healthcare for the homeless. I learned a lot about how to practice holistic medicine from it, and I also saw a presentation by him (most inspirational thing I've ever been privy to) and got to meet him afterwards.

A great read on the ethics of physician assisted suicide is A Life Worth Living by Dr. Robert Martensen.

Another great non-medical read is Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. It's a book on evolutionary psychology and details the evolutionary reasons behind human action with some pretty good data to support it.

I also really enjoyed Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible. I recommend it if you're even remotely interested in theoretical physics, astronomy, or science fiction.

I like this thread a lot guys, lets keep it going.
 
If you're just looking for an entertaining book, I just read I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. Laughed the whole way.
 
I'm reading Landmark:The Inside Story of America's New Health Care Law and What It Means for All of Us by the staff of the Washington Post.

If you're looking for a good book that simply explains what is going on in health care reform, this is a good book (especially for interviews). I haven't found it to be too biased one way or the other, just pretty much stating the facts in an easy to understand way.
 
Wow! I can't believer nobody has mentioned:

Oliver Sacks - The man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Great read. He also has a number of other good ones as well.

If you don't want to read clinical vignettes, then I would recommend:

Kurt Vonnegut - Sirens of Titan.

Just read that one and it was pretty good.
 
These 2 books I read on my medical missions trip just recently:

"On Becoming a Doctor" - Tania Heller, MD
The first few chapters are kind of basics that could be found here on sdn, but the rest and majority of the book is this doctor interviewing several doctors in over 20 different specialites! They discuss what they like about their specialty/don't, how they came to that specialty, etc.

"Tuesdays with Morrie" - Mitch Albom
A young man in college, Mitch, develops this deep relationship with his sociology prof, Morrie, but after graduating loses touch with him. This professor then develops ALS (Lou Gehrig disease) several years later...he ends up going to see him after hearing about the news and they start getting together every Tuesday like old times for their last class...a lesson about life. This is a really moving book and a very fast read!
 
I've recently read "Cutting For Stone" which is a very, very good piece of fiction with just enough medicine and "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" a great non-fiction about the HeLa cells and the woman they came from as well as her family. Both were great reads
 
I would definitely recommend "My Own Country: A Doctor's Story." It's about when AIDS first came to a rural town in Tennessee. It's by Abraham Verghese. His style is very similar to Atual Gawande's. Seriously, it's a great book.
 
divajazzerina said:
Since Atul Gawande's books have been mentioned so many times, I thought I would mention this article of his in the New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande
Click to expand...
I read this article a few days ago, and definitely recommend it to every pre-health care student. This is one of the battles that all clinicians will be and have been facing, especially with the advent of national healthcare. Not to mention that many of us will be asked about this very issue in our interviews for prospective schools.
 
ruiner said:
I finished Children of Men and started Intern: a doctor's initiation by sandeep jauhar. It's pretty interesting, lots of stories about his time as an intern/resident in the ICU. its 300 pages but big print, prob will have it done pretty quick. next on list is hot lights, cold steel.
Click to expand...

👍+1 for Intern by Jauhar
 
Just got Hot Lights, Cold Steel and How Doctors Think in the mail today. Pumped to shelter myself for the next few days.
 
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