A welcome book ... packed with vivid writing, heart-stopping anecdotes and statistical surprises * Financial Times *
This is not a paean to bureaucracy... Gawande... has an instinctive sense of how much jargon the lay reader will tolerate - how to maintain the balance between accessibility and precision. He manages to be vivid without being gruesome... Gawande's style is always clear, with the crispy lilt that is a trademark of the New Yorker -- Rafael Behr * Observer *
Atul Gawande [is] an oncologist, writer and contributor to the New Yorker, whose lucid, intelligent dispatches from the surgical front have entertained and terrified readers for a decade or so... [a] riveting and thought-provoking book -- David Aaronovitch * The Times *
A fascinating read * Catholic Herald *
He argues eloquently and persuasively for the humble checklist. His pitch is candid about the delusions we work under and insightful about our self-justifications for cutting corners * British Medical Journal *
Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world--and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking. Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don't know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don't make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it's just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality. Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists--literally--written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. In the last section of the book, Gawande shows how his research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success. The danger, in a review as short as this, is that it makes Gawande's book seem narrow in focus or prosaic in its conclusions. It is neither. Gawande is a gorgeous writer and storyteller, and the aims of this book are ambitious. Gawande thinks that the modern world requires us to revisit what we mean by expertise: that experts need help, and that progress depends on experts having the humility to concede that they need help. -- Malcolm Gladwell
Important as well as absorbing -- Steven Poole * Guardian *
A fascinating insight into the power of the humble to do list * Psychologies *
this important book teaches lessons that ought to be gratefully embraced by porfessionals in any complex field * Sydney Morning Herald *
