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A review by jacki_f
A Mistake by Carl Shuker
3.0
Elizabeth Taylor is a surgeon at Wellington Hospital. She's highly accomplished and arrogant, at the top of her game. She has learned to tamp down her emotions to the point where she's pretty cold in her interactions with both colleagues and loved ones. She's hard to like.
The book opens with an operation that goes wrong and the rest of the book is about the fallout from that. The theme of mistakes with fatal consequences is also explored by the parallel descriptions of the disastrous Challenger launch in 1986.
I like books that leave it to the reader to infer things without spelling everything out but I felt like this book was too sparsely told. I didn't mind at all the assumption that we would follow the medical jargon (most of it was clear to me and the few parts that weren't didn't matter). However I felt like I was being shut out of Elizabeth's thought processes and occasionally things that seemed quite pivotal were just mentioned after the fact. I would have liked more of that and less of the Challenger story.
The book opens with an operation that goes wrong and the rest of the book is about the fallout from that. The theme of mistakes with fatal consequences is also explored by the parallel descriptions of the disastrous Challenger launch in 1986.
I like books that leave it to the reader to infer things without spelling everything out but I felt like this book was too sparsely told. I didn't mind at all the assumption that we would follow the medical jargon (most of it was clear to me and the few parts that weren't didn't matter). However I felt like I was being shut out of Elizabeth's thought processes and occasionally things that seemed quite pivotal were just mentioned after the fact. I would have liked more of that and less of the Challenger story.