Direct Red

In the tradition of Atul Gawande and Sherwin B. Nuland comes an eloquent and piercing account of a young woman's surgical education. Surgeons have long been known for their allergy to doubt, an unsurprising trait in professionals who must play God, routinely risking someone else's life in order to do their job. But in this illuminating memoir, Gabriel Weston reveals the emotions, passions, and doubts normally hidden behind a surgeon's mask. Weston, a surgeon, is also a writer of extraordinary gifts. Compassionate and truthful, her voice brings us into a theater we are normally not allowed to enter. At Weston's side, we learn what it's like to stand in an operating room holding someone's neck open for seven hours, what happens when the line between the personal and the professional begins to blur, and about the shame of watching a patient die. Interweaving her own story with those of her patients, old and young, Weston evokes both the humor and the heartbreak that come from medicine's daily confrontation with the ultimate unknowability of the human body. With prose that does not flinch from the raw, graphic realities of a surgeon's day, Weston confronts life, death, and the unique difficulties of being a female surgeon in a heavily male-dominated profession.