PositiveThe New York Review of BooksHe divides his book into eight beautifully written chapters that follow the trajectory from independence to death. Being Mortal, the most personal book he has written, ends with the long dying of his own father ... In his most powerful chapter, called \'Letting Go,\' a version of which was published in The New Yorker in 2010, Gawande deals with the awful dilemma of deciding when to stop trying to prolong life, or in his words, \'When should we try to fix and when should we not?\' ... Gawande has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one. I wish he had spent more time on what could be done to make things better (parakeets and dogs aren’t enough), but he has certainly shown us what is wrong. Narrowing the lives of the aged down to mere existence in institutions and submitting the dying to the full panoply of procedures that modern medicine has to offer cause enormous, unnecessary suffering. There is no way, of course, to make old age and all its infirmities disappear; it is what life deals us. But what Gawande shows us in this admirable book is that we could handle it a lot better.
Alison Gopnik
PositiveThe New York Review of Books...the major problem with the comparison is that it’s a straw man, or two straw men. Very few parents are either gardeners or carpenters of children...Most parents lie between those two extremes, including, it seems to me, Gopnik herself ... Fortunately, for most of her book, Gopnik pretty much drops the metaphor, and also says little about how individual parents should raise individual children...when she gets away from gardeners and carpenters, things go much better, despite the impossible breadth of her focus.
