Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

4.4 | 4,202 ratings

Price: 19.69

Last update: 08-26-2024

About this item

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The award-winning book that inspired an Apple Original series from Apple TV+ A landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina—and the suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice—from a Pulitzer Prize–winning physician and reporter

“An amazing tale, as inexorable as a Greek tragedy and as gripping as a whodunit.”—Dallas Morning News

After Hurricane Katrina struck and power failed, amid rising floodwaters and heat, exhausted staff at Memorial Medical Center designated certain patients last for rescue. Months later, a doctor and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs.

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, unspools the mystery, bringing us inside a hospital fighting for its life and into the most charged questions in health care: which patients should be prioritized, and can health care professionals ever be excused for hastening death?

Transforming our understanding of human nature in crisis, Five Days at Memorial exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals how ill-prepared we are for large-scale disasters—and how we can do better.

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, Entertainment Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, Kansas City Star

WINNER: National Book Critics Circle Award, J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ridenhour Book Prize, American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award

Nicholas R. Bresler

A morally complex and divisive read - SPOILERS IN REVIEW

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2014

Simplistically, this is a story of how a hospital full of doctors, family and patients dealt with and sustained through Hurricane Katrina. However, the story that focuses mainly on Dr. Anna Pou is a moral conundrum that is as divisive a subject as I can imagine.

Sherri Fink treads through public files, personal testimonies and witness accounts to bring us a wide look at what took place at a New Orleans hospital as chaos ensued and governmental and corporate response languished. This lack of emergency response seems to be caused by a deadly combination of negligence and incompetence by the staff of the hospital and everyone they seemed to reach out to. Consequently, important decisions had to be made under stress , exhaustion and unbearable heat: Who among us gets to leave/receive critical care first? The oldest? The sickest? The ones with the best chance to survive? The ones with best quality of life chance? Triage was set up and days passed by slowly as people's lives hung in the balance.

Thus enters Dr. Anna Pou. Fink goes into incredible detail of her background and character and gives us a sympathetic/ hard working, no-nonsense type of doctor who delegates authority amongst the nurses and charges at Memorial. Ultimately, it seems according to the book, that Dr.Pou would make important decisions to euthanize certain patients in what seems like a badly-kept secret that morally divided the staff. This is the central focus of the book and how you feel about Dr. Pou's actions will polarize the reader and have you second-guessing your original feelings.

I must say, immediately I felt that euthanasia was completely acceptable. I believe that if somebody is to the point where pain and suffering renders somebody to the point that they are alive in the most basic definition only, I feel it acceptable for them to want to end their life. And, I did indeed feel this way throughout the book about Dr. Pou until you realize that these particular patients never consented. And there in lies the rub: euthanasia should never be put in the hands of the doctor without consent of the patient or family. Furthermore, in the case of Mrs. Burgess and Emmett Everett, not only did they not wish to die, they very much wanted to live. The fact that they were killed on the same day the mass evacuation was taking place only makes it more the tragedy.

The second half of the book focuses on gathering evidence , the politics of prosecuting staff that risked their lives and otherwise behaved heroically during a disaster that most , including myself, got to watch from a distance. It's riveting and I think Fink presents every possible ethical possibility on what happened and what COULD have happened. I feel like she was objective and fair and if anything, only really painted LA attorney general in a negative light.

It's no doubt controversial and there seems to be two camps: those that think that Dr. Pou is an amazing doctor who appears to have killed (with help of other staff, mind you) patients, even if ending their suffering was paramount in her mind. The other half is those that take Fink's reporting as factual. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between , but to those who deride Fink as trying to make a buck by sensationalizing , you have to consider both sides. Dr. Pou obviously has a lot to lose, including her freedom, if these accounts are accurate. She would literally have gotten away with murder. I don't, however, think she meant to kill with malice but rather with compassion. What does make me lose respect for her , though, is her continuing to lie about small details to exaggerate the conditions of the hospital ( lack of water, food, helicopters not being able to fly at night). If there was more of a consensus, or even if there was a moral consensus taken before she made the injections, I'd sleep better. Unfortunately for the victims, it seems like their deaths were carried out clandestinely. Meanwhile, their was an equal conspiracy of disapprovers who did nothing but express outrage over the possible euthanasia amongst themselves while not lifting a finger to stop it.

I could go on and on about this with points both for and against all parties involved and not come within a mile of satisfaction.
It's an astounding read that will test your preconceived notions of right and wrong and I'm not quite sure I'm qualified to judge anybody during a situation as hellish as this.

Vicky and Tom

Amazing, infuriating reporting, but not well written

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2021

A deep investigation of an infuriating story - but not the easiest to get through.

The story shines. The author clearly put in *years* of work, and uses an amazing amount of detail to paint a devastating picture. I plowed the first 200 pages of it in a single sitting, unable to put it down, and walked away changed by what it says about the human race. READ THIS BOOK!

Now, about the writing.... The author absolutely bogs down in all those details, and spends most of the first hundred pages giving a laundry list of characters, biographical details, and scene details (what types of plants were on the lobby, what they ate at the reception, what color the walls were), without any way for the reader to know which parts will be important later.

This is made worse by the fact that, ironically for a newspaper writer, she does not ever give a good 10,000-foot overview, or set a broader scene - "this is the chessboard, and these are the pieces." Instead, she just jumped straight into introducing you to character after character after character. She does *try* to start with an anecdote that tells the whole story, in the prologue - but then she sets that character down and doesn't meaningfully return to him until almost 100 pages in.

As a result, I honestly started to skim or even skip the paragraphs about how 'mamie johnson was known for her colorful draperies....'

A real shame that an editor couldn't whip this amazing reporting into slightly better shape, but still 100 percent recommend.

Siegfried Behrens

Couldn’t put this one down!

Reviewed in the United States on May 20, 2024

The historical accuracy about the city of New Orleans and the attention to detail are meticulous. There’s no doubt that this author did her research, pouring over hours of microfiche film while also getting information directly from the sources. This book had me completely completely captivated and I literally couldn’t put it down. this is definitely one to recommend. Even though the Apple TV series was great, it doesn’t begin to go through other very detailed events both before and after Hurricane Katrina that are described in this book.

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