Readin' Vegans--"Being Mortal"

For our March 28 online book club, we'll discuss BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande (2014). You need not have attended a previous discussion to join us for this one. We'll discuss the book until about 8:00, followed by open conversation.
If you'd like to read ahead:
Apr. 25 -- The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon, by Bill McKibben
May 23 -- Leave Only Footprints, by Conor Knighton
June 27 -- The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson (fiction)

The Zoom link to the discussion is posted on the right, visible to those who RSVP. PLEASE NOTE: THIS LINK DISAPPEARS AT THE MEETUP START TIME, THAT IS, 7:00 PM. We'll be available from 6:50 on to help anyone who might need extra time to connect.
You will need a computer, laptop, smartphone or other device with internet access. It's pretty easy; if you're curious, check out https://zoom.us/.
If you can't get on, call us at 303-300-2368.
We hope to "see" you there!
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In Being Mortal, author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.
He is also a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards.

“A deeply affecting, urgently important book – one not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.” – Katherine Boo
“We have come to medicalize aging, frailty, and death, treating them as if they were just one more clinical problem to overcome. However, it is not only medicine that is needed in one’s declining years but life – a life with meaning, a life as rich and full as possible under the circumstances. Being Mortal is not only wise and deeply moving, it is an essential and insightful book for our times, as one would expect from Atul Gawande, one of our finest physician writers.” – Oliver Sacks
“American medicine, Being Mortal reminds us, has prepared itself for life but not for death. This is Atul Gawande’s most powerful – and moving – book.” – Malcolm Gladwell

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