Five Days at Memorial
Ratings27
Average rating4.1
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning book that inspired an Apple Original series from Apple TV+ • A landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina—and the suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning physician and reporter
“An amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.”—Dallas Morning News
After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs.
Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, unspools the mystery, bringing us inside a hospital fighting for its life and into the most charged questions in health care: which patients should be prioritized, and can health care professionals ever be excused for hastening death?
Transforming our understanding of human nature in crisis, Five Days at Memorial exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals how ill-prepared we are for large-scale disasters—and how we can do better.
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We know all about Katrina here. I live west of New Orleans and Katrina was an object lesson for us.
I didn't know all about Memorial Hospital during Katrina, however. Living on the Texas Gulf Coast obligates me to read this story and learn and share the lessons from this book.
It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy, full of both heroism and suffering. It's a well-researched tragedy, told fairly, without bias, and I was left feeling great compassion for both the medical staff of the hospital as well as the patients and rescuers.
One of the best nonfiction reads of the year.
This book is both intriguing, and extremely hard to read. It's impossible to imagine your own reactions given the conditions the staff and patients had to survive in those five days, but also impossible to think you would make some of the same choices that were made. It brings up moral and ethical issues, and made me question the power and control that are given individuals over the right to life.
