Tornado of Life

In this collection of brief, touching essays, an emergency room doctor presents poignant stories about disease and loneliness and argues that medical professionals are stewards of their patients' stories, morally obligated to look beyond data and tests. -New York Times Book Review ER physician Baruch (What's Left Out) recounts in this unflinching essay collection the professional challenges he's encountered, both pre-Covid and from the worst of the pandemic...Baruch has a knack for narrative and writes in a refined prose, and many entries, such as two concerning domestic violence victims who won't say that they're in danger, are tough to forget. Fans of Thomas Fisher's The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER should give this a look. -Publishers Weekly Baruch (Fourteen Stories: Doctors, Patients, and Other Strangers), an emergency room physician and author of two award-winning short story collections, writes a book of essays about his experiences in the ER and his philosophy of patient care. The book showcases his belief that the power of story is just as important to doctors as it is to patients. However, Baruch writes, chronic underfunding and understaffing make it difficult for doctors to make the time to hear patients' stories, to read between the lines. Written during the pandemic, the book includes a couple of essays about working with COVID patients, but COVID is not the full focus. This is not an overtly political book about the state of the health system; it is an homage to the people Baruch has treated, failed, and helped. His ability to tell a story is what makes it so compelling. Tender, thoughtful... it focuses on a doctor doing his best to truly hear patients, while constantly questioning whether his efforts are enough. Beautifully written with a different take on life, this is recommended for any collection. -Library Journal A rich collection of stories from years of working as an ER doctor...Baruch's point is not simply to reaffirm what many doctor-writers and medical humanities programs have now made clear-that story making is an essential part of clinical medicine. His point is that story making is also a morally, spiritually, and medically relevant part of clinical responsibility. It is a precarious business, riddled with pitfalls, that needs to be approached with attentiveness and skill...With admirable humility, Baruch avoids pontificating about what his professional colleagues should do. Instead he reflects openheartedly on what he has learned from patients, from his own mistakes, and from surprising epiphanies that come from the way a patient worded a question, or from a telling metaphor, or from an information gap that opened a new path of inquiry. -The Christian Century Tornado of Life is a tour de force. It features patient narratives, sketches of the ER, self-portraits of [Baruch's] development as a provider throughout [his] career, and [his] reflective and analytical essays on the multidirectional relationships between narrative and healthcare. It's a many-faceted collection. -Synapsis Journal