In Five Days at Memo­r­i­al: Life and Death In A Storm-Rav­aged Hos­pi­tal, physi­cian and reporter Sheri Fink recon­structs five days at Memo­r­i­al Med­ical Cen­ter and draws the read­er into the lives of the doc­tors and nurs­es who strug­gled to pre­serve life amidst chaos. After Kat­ri­na destroyed the gen­er­a­tors that make twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry med­i­cine pos­si­ble, to be a patient at Memo­r­i­al meant you were whol­ly at the mer­cy of care­givers forced to make a cas­cade of deci­sions about whose lives could be pre­served and who would most like­ly die in the face of seri­ous ill­ness and lim­it­ed med­ical care. The result was an almost unthink­able tragedy: sev­er­al health pro­fes­sion­als delib­er­ate­ly inject­ed severe­ly ill patients with drugs to has­ten their deaths. In an engross­ing nar­ra­tive that expos­es the human dra­ma that fuels med­i­cine and the unchar­tered ter­ri­to­ry of end-of-life care, Fink brings the read­er into a hos­pi­tal fight­ing for its life and into a con­ver­sa­tion about just how ill-pre­pared we are as Amer­i­cans for the impact of large-scale dis­as­ters on the most vul­ner­a­ble among us.