Tina Bennett has been my tireless agent, my unstinting protector, and, going all the way back to college, my dear friend. Although everything about publishing books is changing, she has always found a way for me to grow an audience and still write what I want to write. She is without peer.
The Rockefeller Foundation provided its gorgeous Bellagio Center as a retreat where I started the book and then returned to finish the first draft. My subsequent conversations about that manuscript with Henry, Tina, David Segal, and Jacob Weisberg transformed the way I saw the book, leading me to remake it from beginning to end. Leo Carey did a line edit of the final draft, and his ear for language and clear expression made the book tremendously better. Riva Hocherman helped greatly at every stage, including providing an invaluable final read through. Thank you also to Grigory Tovbis and Roslyn Schloss for their essential contributions.
My wife, Kathleen Hobson, has been more important to this book than she knows. Every idea and story here we have talked through together and in many instances also lived through together. She has been a constant, encouraging force. I have never been a facile writer. I don’t know what those authors who describe the words just flowing out of them are talking about. For me, the words come only slowly and after repeated effort. But Kathleen has always helped me find the words and made me know the work is achievable and worthwhile no matter how long it takes. She and our three amazing children, Hunter, Hattie, and Walker, have pulled for me each step of the way.
Then there is Sara Bershtel, my extraordinary editor. As she worked on the book, Sara was forced to live through its most difficult realities in her own family. It would have been understandable for her to choose to step aside. But her devotion to the book remained unwavering, and she went through every draft with me meticulously, working paragraph by paragraph to make sure I’d got every part as true and right as I could. Sara’s dedication is the reason this book says what I wanted it to say. And that is why it is dedicated to her.
About the Author
ATUL GAWANDE is the author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, 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. In his work in public health, he is director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health system innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.