In the high-stakes profession of neurosurgery, the bigger you are, the harder you fall. Or so it seems in the nifty first novel by CNN's chief medical correspondent Gupta, who is also a practicing neurosurgeon and nonfiction author. At the Chelsea General Hospital in Michigan, Dr. Ty Wilson is suffering from a serious crisis in confidence after a child dies during an operation. His medical colleagues include George Villanueva, a hulking former NFL player turned ER doctor, and Tina Ridgeway, a meticulous neurosurgeon whose home life is a mess. For quirkiness, there's a patient who undergoes surgery for bleeding cerebral aneurysms and develops an unusual postoperative mania for sketching human ears. For irony, the perfectionist head of surgery makes a jumbo mistake, and a middle-aged Korean neurosurgeon is afflicted with a deadly brain tumor. Despite their flaws, these fictional physicians possess extremely high empathy quotients. They make clinical and personal blunders, yet some attain redemption, and nearly all experience epiphanies. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to write a novel, but with Monday Mornings, readers will be glad one did.
In the high-stakes profession of neurosurgery, the bigger you are, the harder you fall. Or so it seems in the nifty first novel by CNN's chief medical correspondent Gupta, who is also a practicing neurosurgeon and nonfiction author. At the Chelsea General Hospital in Michigan, Dr. Ty Wilson is suffering from a serious crisis in confidence after a child dies during an operation. His medical colleagues include George Villanueva, a hulking former NFL player turned ER doctor, and Tina Ridgeway, a meticulous neurosurgeon whose home life is a mess. For quirkiness, there's a patient who undergoes surgery for bleeding cerebral aneurysms and develops an unusual postoperative mania for sketching human ears. For irony, the perfectionist head of surgery makes a jumbo mistake, and a middle-aged Korean neurosurgeon is afflicted with a deadly brain tumor. Despite their flaws, these fictional physicians possess extremely high empathy quotients. They make clinical and personal blunders, yet some attain redemption, and nearly all experience epiphanies. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to write a novel, but with Monday Mornings, readers will be glad one did.—Booklist
Praise for CHEATING DEATH: "You will be on the edge of your seat as you read the superbly crafted stories of people who have beaten the odds, something I like to think I know quite a bit about. My friend Dr. Sanjay Gupta, America's doctor, has written a page-turner. It's an exciting medical thriller with the compassion, hope, excitement and aspiration that define Sanjay." --Lance Armstrong
Praise for CHEATING DEATH: "I owe my recovery and my health to medical advances and the remarkable pioneers behind them. In his new book, the World's Doctor, Sanjay Gupta, delivers a breathtaking preview of a coming revolution in medicine that challenges virtually everything we think we know about living and dying. A truly provocative and fascinating reading experience." --President Bill Clinton
In his fiction debut, Dr. Gupta—a practicing neurosurgeon and Chief Medical Correspondent at CNN—transports readers into an exclusive cadre of Chelsea General surgeons linked by the dreaded and revered Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conferences on the titular Monday mornings—the meetings at which doctors are held accountable for mistakes or deaths in the operating room. Each of the lavishly described (though emotionally flat) main characters is a caricature of a surgeon: for the overly-dedicated Sydney Saxena, life is career, pager, exercise. Tina Ridgeway—the gorgeous, married brainiac—and heartthrob Ty Wilson, the first to endure an M&M, satisfy the requisite hospital drama illicit romance; meticulous Sung Park wants to see Ty "publicly crucified;" and XXXL-scrubbed George "Gato Grande" Villanueva is the brilliant, brash, ER chief and former NFL player around which much of the novel revolves. Despite these potentially intriguing character sketches and plot points, Gupta (Cheating Death) attempts to weave too many threads and is thus unable to sufficiently develop his doctors or a compelling story line. Though the book reads quickly, medical jargon will alternately intrigue and frustrate a general audience, and readers will be left wondering whether Gupta should be the subject of his own M&M. (Mar.)
In his first novel, neurosurgeon and CNN medical reporter Gupta follows the professional and personal lives of five doctors at Chelsea General Hospital in Michigan. Ty Wilson, Tina Ridgeway, and Sung Park are neurosurgeons; Sydney Saxena is a cardiothoracic surgeon; and George Villanueva is chief of the emergency department. The book's title refers to conferences held early on Mondays at which hospital physicians must acknowledge and learn from their mistakes. Wilson, who is having an affair with the married Ridgeway, must appear at one of these conferences after his overconfidence results in the death of a young boy. Park and Saxena both drive themselves relentlessly as they vie eventually to replace "the Boss," chief of medical staff Harding Hooten. Former pro-football player Villanueva is trying to reconnect with his estranged teenage son, who lives with Villanueva's ex-wife. VERDICT Anyone who enjoys medical fiction should like this novel, despite a few less-than-realistic plot developments. Gupta keeps his numerous characters and their intermingled lives and crises in play and convinces readers to care about each one. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/11.]—A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib.
This novel takes place at a fictional hospital in Michigan, but it’s reasonable to believe that it’s informed by the experiences of the author, who is a neurosurgeon. The story follows five neurosurgeons as they confront their performance on the operating table by reflecting on their successes and failures at each week’s Monday Morning Morbidity and Mortality conference. Narrator Christian Rummel gives this book a fast-paced, dramatic reading that makes it both compelling and entertaining. He effectively uses his deep, authoritative, nasal-tinged voice to portray the doctors as they see themselves. Some are methodical while others believe themselves to be healing gods. Rummel has excellent diction, and he’s a master of pacing and emphasis. He’s also fully committed to his character voices, and they fit the book’s tone perfectly. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Standard-issue medical procedural from CNN medical correspondent and surgeon Gupta (Cheating Death, 2009). In this debut novel, Gupta commits some of the more common errors of Fiction 101 by telling more than showing, and then showing the mundane with as much attention as the distinctive. Thus the second sentence of the book: "Wearing bright blue polyester jumpsuits with a yellow insignia on the left front pocket and standard-issue black boots, they were moving fast." Moving fast, check. But would it have mattered whether the uniforms were of green cotton, the badges red, the boots brown? The matter-of-factness and attention to every detail would probably serve a surgeon in theater very well, the purposes of a yarn less effectively; yet both qualities overwhelm the dramatic: "The aneurysm, a small blister on the surface of an artery, had suddenly let loose, spraying blood throughout her brain. She had likely felt a sudden thunderclap headache, and within seconds was rendered unconscious." "One of the possible risks was damage to the olfactory nerve that ran near the cancerous growth. If that was nicked or cut, the patient would lose the sense of smell." Just so, Gupta's characters are of the stock variety: the hardbitten, arrogant master cutter, the encouraging mentor, the poor kid out to save the world ("the first Robidaux to consider college," the foreign resident who works twice as hard as everyone else--in short, the kind of people whom, mutatis mutandis, you'd send into combat in a World War II film, or, in this instance, into the emergency ward. In that regard, Gupta's book makes its greatest contribution: It shows that a doctor's life isn't all glamour and golf on one hand or completely clinical on the other, even if most of the coitus is interruptus. All does not end well, not for certain patients and certain docs alike, but the quotidian world ticks on; it's very much as if James Michener had attempted a medical thriller, though without the thrill and without Michener's epic length. Competent but no more--and, of course, one always wants something beyond mere competence from a surgeon.
