Walk on Water, by Michael Ruhlman

I've made it pretty clear on both this blog and particularly my food one that I'm a big fan of Michael Ruhlman. I think he's a great writer who advocates for things I care about, such as sustainable and slow food, which made it interesting to read a book by him that wasn't about food at all. It was about congenital heart disease.

Ruhlman spent a good deal of time at the Cleveland Clinic, a hospital that specializes in babies born with heart troubles, and he describes what that world is like. He tells us what drives the staff to work such a horrible, important job, particularly profiling Dr. Roger Mee, one of the top pediatric heart surgeons in the world. He tells us how the families are affected. With great sensitivity, he talks about what the babies go through.

This book is interesting in many ways- you get some history, you get some troubling facts about lesser heart centres, and you get absorbing looks into the lives of doctors and families. I quite liked it.