I bet that if you’re friends with a doctor or a police officer you are either a doctor or a police officer yourself.
 Both occupations give their practitioners intimate views to dramatic times in the lives of others. This too often leads them to having a clubby, supercilious view of what they’d call “civilians,” or “ordinary people” that makes much of what they’ve written come off as condescending, even smug.
 Atul Gawande avoids that In Being Mortal—Medicine and What Matters in the End. Not that you don’t know who and what he is, which is a Harvard Medical School professor and Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon who writes best selling books and articles for The New Yorker, but in this book Gawande freely shares his shortcomings and what he learns along his way through the mess of the American healthcare system’s handling of its citizens last days.
 Gawande has the rare talent for writing well and knowing how to research his subject objectively. Being Mortal has an introduction, eight chapters, and an epilogue. To me, the beginning of the epilogue sounds like it would have made a good introduction:

Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and the cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be.

 This is the kind of book you keep. Not that you’ll want to go back and reread the several case histories Gawande uses to illustrate his ideas. None of them has a happy ending. But the book as a whole is tantamount to having the hard conversations—the title of the seventh chapter—that nearly everyone will have at some point near the end of his or her life, or the life of someone he or she is close to. Gawande has seen enough and thought enough that he has gained genuine wisdom that may not be greater than that of the reader, but has been put into words well, like this from the last chapter:

In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.