Atul Gawande

I think I blogged earlier about trying to read The Checklist Manifesto and being put off by the blood and gore and other medical detail.  I have continued to push through the book, to great results.  I was a little frustrated by Gawande's seemingly lengthy digression into the methods of commercial builders, but now that I've seen how he loops his learnings there back into his own work on harm mitigation in surgery, I'm getting it. When Gawande is on task (and, it turns out, he pretty much always is, it's just not always as apparent), his writing shines with the light of what could be called true religion, but what the Hungarian guy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow."  He is deeply engaged with what he's trying to do and it's catching.  I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.