Book Club

In her book, Five Days at Memorial, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos. Drawing from a culmination of six years of reporting, Dr. Fink unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing listeners into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing.

Click here for Part 2 of this fascinating two-part exploration of the disaster, a hospital's response, and the repercussions that have rippled through its affected staff, patients, and families years later.

In December 2005, the National Football League produced a scientific paper concluding that "professional football players do not sustain frequent repetive blows to the brain on a regular basis." That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: a chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players -- including some of the all-time greats -- to madness. In this conversation with Mark Fainaru-Wada, author of League of Denial, the NFL's apparent efforts to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage over a period of nearly two decades are put into the spotlight.

From the 15th to the mid-19th centuries, scurvy caused more deaths at sea than storms, shipwrecks, combat and all other diseases combined, according to author Stephen Bown. In this remarkable discussion, Bown talks about the harrowing path toward the cure for scurvy. While ranking among the greatest of human accomplishments, its impact on history has, until now, been largely ignored.

A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across North America when the War of Independence began, and until now we have known almost nothing about it. Author Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply Variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone on the continent. Join Dr. John Russell in exploring Fenn's innovative work, which brings to light how this megatragedy was met and what its consequences were for the young republic.

A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across North America when the War of Independence began, and until now we have known almost nothing about it. Author Elizabeth A. Fenn is the first historian to reveal how deeply Variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone on the continent. Join Dr. John Russell in exploring Fenn's innovative work, which brings to light how this megatragedy was met and what its consequences were for the young republic.

When the next pandemic arrives, what will it look like? From which innocent host animal will it emerge? Will we be ready? Addressing these and other questions is David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. Mr. Quammen's book illuminates the origins and dynamics of Ebola, SARS, bird flu, Lyme disease, and other emerging threats.

Hospitalized with a freak case of tropical pneumonia and ashamed of a middle-aged body best described as "a python that swallowed a goat," author A.J. Jacobs felt compelled to change his ways and get healthy. In his book, Drop Dead Healthy, Jacobs encapsulates his experiences of consulting an army of experts and subjecting himself to dozens of different workouts, diets, and devices - from Finger Fitness to Strollercize sessions, and from veganism to "extreme chewing."

Hospitalized with a freak case of tropical pneumonia and ashamed of a middle-aged body best described as "a python that swallowed a goat," author A.J. Jacobs felt compelled to change his ways and get healthy. In his book, Drop Dead Healthy, Jacobs encapsulates his experiences of consulting an army of experts and subjecting himself to dozens of different workouts, diets, and devices - from Finger Fitness to Strollercize sessions, and from veganism to "extreme chewing."

At the turn of the last century, a powerful smallpox epidemic swept the United States from coast to coast. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern tobacco plantations to the dense immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the nascent American empire. In Pox, award-winning historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continentwide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the twentieth century.

Author Christopher McDougall's book, Born To Run, is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? Isolated by Mexico's deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. Mr. McDougall set out to discover their secrets. In the process, he has journied from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to a climactic race in the Copper Canyons that pits America's best ultra-runners against the tribe.