Tonight's guests are Atul Gawande on The Daily Show and James McPherson on The Colbert Report.
Atul Gawande is a surgeon, public health researcher and author. His latest book is Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.
In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending
Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.
Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession’s ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.
Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.
Atul Gawande Asks: How Do We Want To Die?
As old age has been transformed by medical technology, elderly citizens are often robbed of a humane end to their lives—living their final months in clinical settings, spending more time with professional caregivers than with loved ones.
Further highlighting the difficult choices faced by today’s families, Gawande does not romanticize having an elderly parent live with adult children. In our hyper-medical culture, the “burdens for today’s [family] caregiver have actually increased from what they would have been a century ago.” An adult child, often still raising her own family, must monitor a vast array of prescriptions; drive to endless doctor, specialist and lab appointments; cook separate meals for restricted diets.
“Being Mortal” chronicles nursing home successes, like that of Dr. Bill Thomas, who created an entirely new social structure in nursing homes to combat what he calls the “Three Plagues” of nursing home life: “boredom, loneliness, helplessness.” There are profiles of senior communities that offer innovative options for independent and assisted living, including Newbridge on the Charles in Dedham, Orchard Cove in Canton and Beacon Hill Villages in Boston.
This sounds like a good book. When I was little, a friend of the family had to go to a nursing home. The bleach smell and overall atmosphere creeped me out any time we would visit. When my Grandmother had to go into one, I thought as an adult now it would be better. It wasn't. My grandmother had frontal lobe dementia and we cared for her as long as we could at home but eventually she needed around the clock professional care. Even though it was one of the best facilities in the region it still was a very sad place. There has to be a better way of providing the care that people need.
James McPherson is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor Emeritus of American History at Princeton University. He is an American Civil War historian and his latest book is Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief
History has not been kind to Jefferson Davis. His cause went down in disastrous defeat and left the South impoverished for generations. If that cause had succeeded, it would have torn the United States in two and preserved the institution of slavery. Many Americans in Davis’s own time and in later generations considered him an incompetent leader, if not a traitor. Not so, argues James M. McPherson. In Embattled Rebel, McPherson shows us that Davis might have been on the wrong side of history, but it is too easy to diminish him because of his cause’s failure. In order to understand the Civil War and its outcome, it is essential to give Davis his due as a military leader and as the president of an aspiring Confederate nation.
Davis did not make it easy on himself. His subordinates and enemies alike considered him difficult, egotistical, and cold. He was gravely ill throughout much of the war, often working from home and even from his sickbed. Nonetheless, McPherson argues, Davis shaped and articulated the principal policy of the Confederacy with clarity and force: the quest for independent nationhood. Although he had not been a fire-breathing secessionist, once he committed himself to a Confederate nation he never deviated from this goal. In a sense, Davis was the last Confederate left standing in 1865.
As president of the Confederacy, Davis devoted most of his waking hours to military strategy and operations, along with Commander Robert E. Lee, and delegated the economic and diplomatic functions of strategy to his subordinates. Davis was present on several battlefields with Lee and even took part in some tactical planning; indeed, their close relationship stands as one of the great military-civilian partnerships in history.
Most critical appraisals of Davis emphasize his choices in and management of generals rather than his strategies, but no other chief executive in American history exercised such tenacious hands-on influence in the shaping of military strategy. And while he was imprisoned for two years after the Confederacy’s surrender awaiting a trial for treason that never came, and lived for another twenty-four years, he never once recanted the cause for which he had fought and lost. McPherson gives us Jefferson Davis as the commander in chief he really was, showing persuasively that while Davis did not win the war for the South, he was scarcely responsible for losing it.
Book review: ‘Embattled Rebel’ Jefferson Davis, by James M. McPhersonA Leader in Defeat
To this day it is difficult for many Americans to view Davis with dispassion, but McPherson has made a noble attempt to do so. Though his “sympathies lie with the Union side in the Civil War,” in this book he has “sought to transcend my convictions and to understand Jefferson Davis as a product of his time and circumstances.” Davis himself does not make that easy. “He did not suffer fools gladly,” McPherson writes, “and he let them know it. He did not practice the skillful politician’s art of telling others what they wanted to hear. He did not flatter their egos, and he sometimes asserted his own. He did not hesitate to criticize others but was often thin-skinned about their criticisms of him. Davis could be austere, humorless and tediously argumentative.”
What it all comes down to is that a reasonably convincing case can be made for Davis. He was not a military genius, but he was a better strategist than many of his generals. He had the wisdom to put Lee in charge of the Confederate armed forces. As McPherson says in conclusion: “While the Lincoln-Grant team eventually won the war, this does not mean that the Davis-Lee team was responsible for losing it. For in the final analysis, the salient truth about the American Civil War is not that the Confederacy lost but that the Union won.”
The entire Washington Post article is worth reading.
I liked this part
Then as ever after, armchair generals in newspaper editorial offices decided they knew more about how to conduct the war than those in actual power, and they turned on Davis (who brought to the position of commander in chief a West Point diploma and extensive military service) and let him have it with both barrels
The only difference today is that our media is so partisan that Fox would never rip into a Republican for doing the same exact things they rip Obama for doing. As for the book, it is different since it is so difficult to remove the color of ideology from a person and just focus on their actions when it was their ideology that helped drive those actions.
This Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Tu 10/7: Bill O'Reilly
We 10/8: Leon Panetta
Th 10/9: Jeremy Renner
THE COLBERT REPORT
Tu 10/7: Leon Wieseltier
We 10/8: Carol Burnett
Th 10/9: Robert Plant
Somebody else is going to have to post for the week of October 20 if you want a diary. I will be in Boston that week helping homeless people.