One of the "New York Times"'s Best Ten Books of the Year
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the 2014 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize, and the Ridenhour Book Prize
An ALA Notable Book, finalist for the NYPL 2014 Helen Bernstein Award, finalist for the SIBA Book Award, and shortlisted for ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal
An NPR "Great Reads" Book, a "Chicago Tribune" Best Book, a "Seattle Times "Best Book, a "Time "Magazine Best Book, "Entertainment Weekly"'s #1 Nonfiction Book, a "Christian Science Monitor "Best Book, and a "Kansas City Star" Best Book
Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink's landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina - and her suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice.
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 to maintain life amid chaos.
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"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 health professionals 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 in America 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.

"From the Hardcover edition."

In the tradition of the best writing on human behaviour and moral choices in the face of disaster, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs five days at New Orleans' Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amidst 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 health professionals 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 our understanding of human nature in crisis.

From Sheri Fink, author of Five Days at Memorial, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionIn April 1992, a handful of young physicians, not one of them a surgeon, was trapped along with 50,000 men, women, and children in the embattled enclave of Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. There the doctors faced the most intense professional, ethical, and personal predicaments of their lives.Drawing on extensive interviews, documents, and recorded materials she collected over four and a half years, doctor and journalist Sheri Fink tells the harrowing- and ultimately enlightening- story of these physicians and the three who try to help them: an idealistic internist from Doctors without Borders, who hopes that interposition of international aid workers will help prevent a massacre an aspiring Bosnian surgeon willing to walk through minefields to reach the civilian wounded and a Serb doctor on the opposite side of the front line with the army that is intent on destroying his former colleagues.With limited resources and a makeshift hospital overflowing with patients, how can these doctors decide who to save and who to let die? Will their duty to treat patients come into conflict with their own struggle to survive? And are there times when medical and humanitarian aid ironically prolong war and human suffering rather than helping to relieve it?