Books
Check out our picks of the latest page-turners.
words by > Michael J. Bandler
Send
David Shipley and Will Schwalbe
How long has it been since you sent an email that you wish you hadn’t? A week? A day? An hour? Do we think before we click?
Not likely. That makes us deserving of the “why, when, how” refresher course offered by The New York Times op-ed editor David Shipley and book publisher and onetime journalist Will Schwalbe in Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. The authors go into such subjects as “the eight deadly sins of emailing,” reasons to choose a letter over email and issues of grammar and content. However, if there is just one simple rule to remember for effective emailing, the authors say it’s “think before you send.” If the message is Simple, Effective, Necessary and something will get Done, then SEND! (Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95)
Get in the Game
Cal Ripken, Jr.
In sports motivational circles, Cal Ripken, Jr. has become as awesome a force as he was during his two-decades-plus baseball career that will culminate with his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame this August. In the wake of his memoir of a few years ago, Ripken began to explore aspects of the game, both on and off the field, and how his experiences and perspective, as well as those of his manager dad and fellow player brother Bill, had something to contribute. This combination autobiographical and self-help book, coauthored by Donald T. Phillips, combines elements of Ripken’s first two books—one on the game’s fundamentals and the second on parenting young athletes. Get in the Game hits home with eight all-star principles of perseverance, ranging from determination and passion to preparation and placing the sport within the context of one’s life and family, not outside it. (Gotham Books, $26)
Better
Atul Gawande
Among the unsung heroes of the medical profession is that small cadre of humanists who, through evocative writings, have revealed—for both patients and fellow physicians—the emotional and psychological core of what it means to heal someone. These “positive deviants” and out-of-the-box thinkers include the likes of Oliver Sacks, Richard Selzer, Abraham Verghese—and Atul Gawande, a Boston-based general surgeon and staff writer for The New Yorker. His second meticulously crafted book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, following his 2002 debut work, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, considers the degree to which success is—and can be—achieved in his calling. It does not necessarily depend, he argues, on doctorly skills of diagnosis and technique, but rather on the simple “human struggle to do better.” How?
For one, there’s the “fiendishly hard” challenge and complementary successes of being diligent—mirrored “in the universally daunting campaign for adherence to hand-washing regulations and, by contrast, the dramatic reduction in the mortality rate of battle-wounded American soldiers.” Then there’s the challenge to “do right”—how much should doctors charge, their responsibility to patients when they’ve made a mistake, the extent of their fight to save a dangerously ill patient. Finally, Gawande offers compelling case studies of ingenuity within the craft that have resulted over the years in delivering babies, tackling incurable cystic fibrosis and extending lives. What’s Gawande’s bottom line? Through diligence, moral clarity, ingenuity and a simple willingness to try, “better is possible.” (Metropolitan Books, $24)