With grace, courage, humility, and compassion, Bellevue Hospital physician Ofri (cofounder, Bellevue Literary Review; Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue) gives voice and color to the heartbreak, stress, and joy that attends medical practice. New York-based Ofri notes that medicine is about far more then science and that a physician's vision can be sharpened or misled by emotional reactions to patients. In particular, she follows the case of a long-term patient, Julia, exploring the twists and turns of her care and how she impacted Ofri's mind and heart. While this book's best feature is its raw emotional storytelling, it also addresses the academic literature on emotions and medical decision-making without overpowering Ofri's prose or interrupting her momentum. VERDICT A moving and informative read that will appeal to both general readers of books such as Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think or Richard Selzer's Letters to A Young Doctor and to medical students and practicing physicians.—Aaron Klink, Duke Univ., Durham, NC

Ofri (Medicine in Translation: Journeys with My Patients) offers an eloquent and honest take on the inner life of medical professionals, describing not only her own bumpy path from med student to M.D., but also the difficulty of maintaining empathy for patients over the years. "Emotional layers" in medicine are more subtle and pervasive than anyone wants to believe, and they often become the "dominant players in medical decision-making," she argues. Ofri uses the story of illegal immigrant Julia and her battle with congestive heart failure as a jumping-off point for discussing how doctors handle emotionally complicated cases. From the reluctance of Julia's medical team to deliver her "death sentence" to a happy conclusion following the persistence of her hospital team, Ofri celebrates the rare occasions "of joy in our profession" while investigating the "documented decline in empathy" shown to begin in med school. Not every doctor becomes hardened, though many lose their way (the author describes an ER doc who was canned for being drunk on the job). Ofri heaps praise on one M.D. who sagely advises that "it is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has." Ofri's passionate examination of her own fears and doubts alongside broader concerns within the medical field should be eye-opening for the public—and required reading for medical students. (June)