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How We Live
Having won the National Book Award for How We Die, his best-selling inquiry into the causes and modes of death, Sherwin Nuland now turns his attention to the miraculous resiliency of human life. For this lucid, wonderful, and wonder-filled new book explores the body's mysterious capacity to marshal disparate organs and processes in the interests of survival.
Like its prede...more
Like its prede...more
Paperback, 432 pages
Published
May 26th 1998
by Vintage
(first published April 29th 1997)
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Nuland writes a book on how to age gracefully. Because he's a surgeon, I was looking forward to a detailed description of changes to the body that happen to the aging process. That's not what he did. Yes, he did explain the value to healthy lifestyle choices; however, Nuland writes primarily about healthy choices of attitude. He probably has some sound things to say, but I had trouble paying attention, especially to the sections that were more abstract. When I was in my 20s, I enjoyed books abo...more
Very imformative, very helpful and interesting - but the RIGHTEOUSNESS of the man! Another noble exclamation of "How wonderful and fulfilling my career is! How humble I feel in saving a life!" and I might just gag. So as long as this is used as a textbook-like reference, all is good. As a novel, one begins to develop a disturbing urge to stalk and possibly club the author.
this book gave me mixed feelings... the author writes like a physician who wanted to write a book... however, the actual short stories and occurrences throughout the book were inspiring and they made me sit on the edge of my seat content-wise
How is our humanity connected to our biology? Why are we more than the sum of our biological parts?
These two questions drive Nuland's book. Each chapter is an overview of a core human biological system, followed by a connection to the human spirit, usually through the story of an individual.
Nuland is awestruck by the complexity of the human body and its ability to integrate some many functions and then enable us to exceed what the body systems can do alone.
Well worth the...more
These two questions drive Nuland's book. Each chapter is an overview of a core human biological system, followed by a connection to the human spirit, usually through the story of an individual.
Nuland is awestruck by the complexity of the human body and its ability to integrate some many functions and then enable us to exceed what the body systems can do alone.
Well worth the...more
I have always marveled at how balanced our bodies are - how everything works so well for so long - but how does that happen? What is the dance the goes on to keep everything flowing and rejuvenating?
I read this book after reading How We Die.
A great read!
I read this book after reading How We Die.
A great read!
Read How We Die. You will when someone you love is terminally ill. And then read How we Live.Excellent books.
The best parts of this book are the anecdotes from real medical cases. Sadly, there are not nearly enough of those, and Sherwin Nuland has a tendency to be pedantic elsewhere. This reads like a textbook in many spots.
Not quite as gripping as How We Die but still rather informative. I think I now know more about my internal organs than I wanted to know.
After having read How We Die, I searched his other books and have been equally as pleased. How we live describes the body processes of how we live with interesting case studies that make the information more palatable than simply straight up.
The author (an MD) does a great job of creating a very readable book on anatomy in terms the common person can understand and appreciate. As a person fascinated with all things medical, I especially enjoyed the true life accounts of medical situations interspersed throughout. With everything that's required to occur inside of us at any given moment, it truly is a miracle that we are walking around!
Read when I was going through recovery and rehibilitation from a heart transplant this wisdom helped me not only be compliant with Dr's orders and a regiment of medications, but to trust my body to respond in certain ways positively and negatively (I am now 12 years out).
I used to read this aloud to Christine in bed. It led to lots of late night disscussions
Love Nuland's personal insights/stories/experiences. Learned more from this book than any class in school.
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Dr. Sherwin Nuland (born December 1930) is an American surgeon and author who teaches bioethics and medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller and National Book Award winning How We Die, and has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, Time, and the New York Review of Books.
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“The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science”
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1 person liked it
“That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me -- actually more exciting -- than such phenomena were when I was a small boy and thought them divinely (in the supernatural sense) driven.”
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1 person liked it
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