Thomas's Reviews > Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

I appreciated Atul Gawande’s message that we should talk more about death and dying earlier on in our lives instead of avoiding the subject. His deep dive into the stories of elderly people living in nursing homes/assisted living helped me gain greater knowledge about what end-of-life scenarios may look like. I walked away from this book understanding more about the importance of autonomy and meaning for elderly people. I also did get a bit teary-eyed reading about Gawande’s father’s passing.

My two main critiques of this book center on its writing style and its lack of attention to sociocultural factors. First, the actual writing of Being Mortal felt so dry to me – the topics are of great importance, yet I felt like the tone vacillated between journalism and creative nonfiction and didn’t really land on either. Second, I found it odd that Gawande didn’t discuss or at least mention cultures in which talking about grief and death are more normalized (e.g., Native American culture). Furthermore, he didn’t discuss how lack of access to healthcare due to socioeconomic constraints or other barriers (e.g., racism in healthcare) affect issues of death and dying. Even a paragraph that honored these important factors would have elevated this book for me.