Reading List

Authors Like Sheri Fink

Q: Which Sheri Fink book should I start with?

Five Days at Memorial (2013), which is the book everything else rests on and one of the most decorated works of American reporting of its decade. It is long — around 550 pages — and the first half is the storm while the second half is the investigation, so readers who want the disaster narrative sometimes stop at the halfway point. Her earlier book, War Hospital, follows medical staff working under siege in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war, and is shorter and harder.

When the power failed at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, exhausted staff decided which patients would be last for rescue. Months later a doctor and two nurses were accused of injecting some of those patients with life-ending drugs. A grand jury declined to indict Dr Anna Pou in 2007 and the charges against the two nurses were dropped, and Fink spent six years and more than five hundred interviews reconstructing what happened, hour by hour, floor by floor. Five Days at Memorial (Crown, 2013) won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and became an Apple TV+ series in 2022. The magazine version, published by ProPublica with The New York Times Magazine, had already won her a Pulitzer Prize in 2010; she shared a second in 2015 with Times colleagues for reporting on Ebola in West Africa. She holds an MD and a PhD from Stanford and worked in disaster and conflict zones before she wrote about them — her first book, War Hospital, is about medical staff under siege in Srebrenica. Asked on television what she had concluded, she said there is no one hero and no one villain, which is both the method and, for some readers, the frustration. The ten below are chosen on how they handle a catastrophe and what they do with blame.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Investigative non-fiction · Medicine and disaster · Two Pulitzer Prizes · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Sheri Fink, the closest match is Atul Gawande: a working surgeon writing about what medicine actually decides and who gets to decide it, most directly in Being Mortal. For the disaster reconstructed hour by hour, read Erik Larson. For the ancestor of the whole form, read John Hersey's Hiroshima, which put six survivors on the page and let the reader do the arithmetic. Rebecca Skloot and Siddhartha Mukherjee are the medical-ethics shelf. And Jon Krakauer is the reporter who does the opposite of what Fink does: he names who was at fault.

Every book by Sheri Fink →

10 authors like Sheri Fink

The doctor who writes · Closest match

Atul Gawande

American · Complications (2002), The Checklist Manifesto (2009), Being Mortal (2014)

Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Complications is about error and uncertainty in surgery, written while he was still in training; The Checklist Manifesto came out of work with the World Health Organization on a two-minute list that measurably reduced deaths in operating theatres. Being Mortal is about what medicine does to people at the end of their lives, and how rarely anybody asks the patient what they actually want. He served as an assistant administrator at USAID from 2022.

The nearest match for what makes Fink unusual: both are physicians who report, and both write about the moment where a medical system has to choose and has no good option. Gawande's subject is the ordinary version of Fink's emergency — the decisions made in every hospital every week, without a hurricane to explain them. He is also willing to say what he thinks should change, which Fink mostly is not. Read Being Mortal next.

— Lisanne

Every book by Atul Gawande →

Authors like Atul Gawande →

The disaster, hour by hour

Erik Larson

American · Isaac's Storm (1999), The Devil in the White City (2003), Dead Wake (2015)

Isaac's Storm reconstructs the 1900 hurricane that killed thousands in Galveston, Texas, through the local weather bureau chief who did not believe it was coming. Dead Wake follows the Lusitania and the submarine that sank it toward each other across the same fortnight in 1915. Larson works almost entirely from letters, telegrams, testimony and logbooks, and cuts between viewpoints so that the reader knows what is approaching and the people do not.

The technique Fink uses, applied to disasters a century old. Both writers build suspense out of documented time — a clock in the margin, a rising water level, people making reasonable decisions with incomplete information — and both are more interested in institutional failure than in villains. Larson has the advantage that everyone involved is dead and the archives are open; Fink was working with lawyers, grief and a live criminal investigation, which is why her book is harder.

— Lisanne

Every book by Erik Larson →

Authors like Erik Larson →

Older than the genre · The original

John Hersey

American · Hiroshima (1946), A Bell for Adano (1944)

In August 1946 The New Yorker gave an entire issue to a single piece: Hersey following six people who survived the atomic bomb through the morning it fell and the year afterward, written in flat declarative prose with no editorialising at all. It sold out immediately, was read aloud on American radio, and became one of the most reprinted works of journalism ever published. He had already won a Pulitzer Prize for a novel about the American occupation of Italy.

The founding text for everything on this list, and the closest formal ancestor of Five Days at Memorial. Hersey established the method Fink uses: take a catastrophe too large to comprehend, choose a handful of people who were inside it, follow them minute by minute, and refuse to tell the reader what to feel. The restraint is the argument. If you want to see how much of Fink's book is a hundred-page structure invented in 1946, read Hiroshima in an afternoon.

— Lisanne

Consent, and who owns a body

Rebecca Skloot

American · The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

Cells taken without consent from a Black tobacco farmer dying of cervical cancer in 1951 became the first human cell line to grow indefinitely in a laboratory, were shipped to researchers worldwide and underpinned decades of medicine, while her family could not afford health insurance and did not know the cells existed. Skloot spent ten years on the book, largely alongside Lacks's daughter Deborah. HBO filmed it in 2017 with Oprah Winfrey, and in 2023 the family reached a settlement with a biotechnology company over the use of the cells.

The same question as Five Days at Memorial — what a medical system does to people who have no power inside it — approached through one family over sixty years instead of one building over five days. Skloot is more present in her own book than Fink allows herself to be, and the relationship with the Lacks family is part of the story. Both books work because the writer stayed long after the news cycle had finished.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rebecca Skloot →

Authors like Rebecca Skloot →

The disease, given a biography

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Indian-American · The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), The Gene (2016), The Song of the Cell (2022)

The Emperor of All Maladies is a history of cancer written by a practising oncologist, moving between ancient descriptions, the brutal early decades of chemotherapy, the politics of research funding and his own patients in Boston. It won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2011 and Ken Burns turned it into a PBS documentary in 2015. The Gene braids the science of heredity with mental illness in his own family; The Song of the Cell does the same for cellular medicine.

What Fink's medical training does for her, at book length and across centuries. Mukherjee shares her ability to move between a patient in a room and the institutional history that put them there, and he is unusually honest about how much of medicine was arrived at by trial, error and luck. He is the more literary writer and the less rigorous reporter. If Five Days at Memorial left you wanting the medicine rather than the investigation, start here.

— Lisanne

Every book by Siddhartha Mukherjee →

Authors like Siddhartha Mukherjee →

The surgeon, from Britain

Henry Marsh

British · Do No Harm (2014), Admissions (2017)

Marsh spent decades as a neurosurgeon at St George's in London and wrote Do No Harm after retiring from full-time practice: chapters named after conditions, each built around an operation, including the ones that went wrong and the patients he damaged. He is unusually direct about surgical vanity, about the NHS as an institution, and about the gap between what a consultant tells a family and what he privately expects. He also spent years working in Ukraine, the subject of a documentary.

The European counterpart, and the most unguarded writer here. Marsh does what Fink does — put you in the room where an irreversible medical decision is made under pressure — from inside rather than as a reporter, which means he has to account for his own errors rather than other people's. Read him alongside Five Days at Memorial and the Memorial staff become considerably harder to judge from a distance.

— Lisanne

The reporting standard

Katherine Boo

American · Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012)

Boo spent more than three years in Annawadi, a settlement beside Mumbai airport, working with translators, video and thousands of pages of public records obtained under India's right-to-information law, following families through a garbage economy, a death and a criminal case built on false testimony. The book won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2012. She had earlier won a Pulitzer at The Washington Post for reporting on neglect in group homes.

The other great example of a reporter staying until the story is actually understood. Boo and Fink both spent years on communities under extreme pressure, both keep themselves entirely off the page, and both are scrupulous about what is documented versus what somebody remembers. Boo goes further in one respect: her author's note explains exactly how every scene was sourced, which is the standard Fink's book is measured against and largely meets.

— Lisanne

Every book by Katherine Boo →

Authors like Katherine Boo →

The system that was warned

Michael Lewis

American · The Big Short (2010), The Fifth Risk (2018), The Premonition (2021)

The Premonition follows a group of American public health officials and scientists who had spent years building pandemic response plans, and what happened to those plans in 2020. The Fifth Risk is about the parts of the federal government that manage catastrophic risk and what happens when nobody is paying attention to them. The Big Short did the same for the people who saw the mortgage collapse coming. He writes almost entirely through individuals rather than institutions.

Fink's epilogue, expanded into a career. The last section of Five Days at Memorial is about how little changed in hospital disaster planning after Katrina, and that is Lewis's entire subject: the warning that was issued, filed and ignored. He is far more entertaining and considerably less careful, building narratives around a few charismatic outsiders in a way that specialists in the field often dispute. Read The Premonition if the preparedness argument was what stayed with you.

— Lisanne

Every book by Michael Lewis →

Authors like Michael Lewis →

The epidemic, before it arrives

Sonia Shah

American · The Fever (2010), Pandemic (2016), The Next Great Migration (2020)

Pandemic traces how new diseases move from animals into humans and then into cities, using cholera's nineteenth-century journey as the template and reporting from live outbreak sites. The Fever is a five-hundred-thousand-year history of malaria and of the repeated failures to eliminate it. The Next Great Migration argues that the movement of people, animals and plants is normal rather than aberrant, and that the science used to argue otherwise has an ugly history.

The wider frame around Fink's reporting on Ebola. Shah writes the conditions that produce the emergency — drainage, housing, trade routes, who gets to move — where Fink writes the emergency itself, and reading them together is the difference between the flood and the weather system. She is more polemical than Fink and works from research more than from the scene. Start with Pandemic.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sonia Shah →

Authors like Sonia Shah →

The argument against her

Jon Krakauer

American · Into the Wild (1996), Into Thin Air (1997), Missoula (2015)

Into Thin Air is Krakauer's account of the 1996 Everest season in which eight people died on a single day, written as a participant who survived it, and it apportions responsibility explicitly. The Kazakh guide Anatoli Boukreev disputed his account and published a rebuttal, The Climb, and the argument continued until Boukreev's death in an avalanche in 1997. Missoula examines how a university town handled a series of rape allegations and names the institutions he holds responsible.

The opposite editorial choice, made just as seriously. Fink's position is that there is no one hero and no one villain; Krakauer's is that somebody decided something and a reader deserves to be told who. Both approaches have costs — his got a dead man's reputation argued over for a decade, hers leaves some readers feeling the book refuses to land. Read Into Thin Air after Five Days at Memorial and you will have a clear view of what each method buys and what it gives away.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jon Krakauer →

Authors like Jon Krakauer →

Where to start if you loved Sheri Fink

If you want the closest match, read Atul Gawande.

Being Mortal. What medicine does at the end of a life, by a surgeon.

If you want the original, read John Hersey.

Hiroshima. Six survivors, one morning, and not a word of editorialising.

If you want the hour-by-hour disaster, read Erik Larson.

Isaac's Storm. Galveston, 1900, and the man who said it would be fine.

If you want the medical ethics, read Rebecca Skloot.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Cells taken without asking, and sixty years of consequences.

If you want a reporter who names names, read Jon Krakauer.

Into Thin Air. Eight deaths on Everest, with the blame assigned.

If you want more non-fiction of this kind

My shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Sheri Fink

Who should I read if I love Sheri Fink?

Atul Gawande is the closest — a practising surgeon writing about the decisions medicine makes and who is allowed to make them. John Hersey's Hiroshima is the founding text of the method she uses, and Erik Larson does the same hour-by-hour reconstruction on historical disasters. Rebecca Skloot, Siddhartha Mukherjee and Henry Marsh are the medical-ethics shelf, Marsh from inside the operating theatre. Katherine Boo is the reporter whose sourcing standard Fink's book is measured against. Michael Lewis and Sonia Shah cover the preparedness argument from her epilogue. Jon Krakauer is the argument against her refusal to assign blame.

Which Sheri Fink book should I start with?

Five Days at Memorial (2013), which is the book everything else rests on and one of the most decorated works of American reporting of its decade. It is long — around 550 pages — and the first half is the storm while the second half is the investigation, so readers who want the disaster narrative sometimes stop at the halfway point. Her earlier book, War Hospital, follows medical staff working under siege in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war, and is shorter and harder.

What actually happened at Memorial Medical Center?

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005 the hospital lost power, the water rose, the temperature climbed and evacuation was slow and disorganised. Staff triaged patients for rescue, placing some last. Months later Dr Anna Pou and two nurses were arrested and accused of injecting patients with life-ending drugs. The charges against the two nurses were dropped, and in 2007 a grand jury declined to indict Pou. Fink's book reconstructs the five days and the investigation from more than five hundred interviews; Pou spoke to her about the storm but declined, on legal advice, to discuss the deaths.

Is the Apple TV+ series faithful to the book?

Broadly, in structure. The series, released in 2022, follows the same two halves — the days inside the hospital, then the investigation — and keeps the book's refusal to hand down a verdict. What a dramatisation cannot reproduce is the sourcing: the book is explicit about which accounts conflict and who declined to speak, and that scaffolding is what makes the ambiguity earned rather than convenient. Read the book afterwards rather than instead.

Has Sheri Fink won a Pulitzer Prize?

Two. The first, in 2010, for investigative reporting, for “The Deadly Choices at Memorial”, published jointly by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, which also won a National Magazine Award. The second, in 2015, shared with New York Times colleagues for international reporting on the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, which also brought a George Polk Award. Five Days at Memorial separately won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.

Is Sheri Fink writing a new book?

Nothing has been announced as of September 2026. She remains a correspondent at The New York Times, where she has continued to report on health systems under strain, and Five Days at Memorial is still her most recent book. Given that it took six years, and War Hospital preceded it by a decade, a long gap is consistent with how she works.

Why does Five Days at Memorial not say who was guilty?

Because Fink's conclusion is that the framing is wrong. Asked about it on television when the book came out, she said there is no one hero and no one villain. The book instead documents what was decided, by whom, under what conditions, and what the law and medical ethics actually say about triage in a disaster — and then leaves the reader with the question of what they would have done. Readers who want a verdict find this evasive; readers who have worked in emergencies usually do not.

What did Sheri Fink do before journalism?

Medicine and relief work. She holds both an MD and a PhD from Stanford and worked in disaster and conflict zones, including in the Balkans, before writing about them, which is where War Hospital came from. That background is why her reporting can follow a clinical decision in detail — which drug, at what dose, on whose authority — rather than stopping at the door of the ward.

Sources

List last reviewed 9 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Sheri Fink

10 authors like Sheri Fink

Atul Gawande

Erik Larson

John Hersey

Rebecca Skloot

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Henry Marsh

Katherine Boo

Michael Lewis

Sonia Shah

Jon Krakauer

Where to start if you loved Sheri Fink

Frequently asked questions about authors like Sheri Fink

Who should I read if I love Sheri Fink?

Which Sheri Fink book should I start with?

What actually happened at Memorial Medical Center?

Is the Apple TV+ series faithful to the book?

Has Sheri Fink won a Pulitzer Prize?

Is Sheri Fink writing a new book?

Why does Five Days at Memorial not say who was guilty?

What did Sheri Fink do before journalism?

Lisanne Swart

Thanks for reading,

Offerings

My Bookshelf |

The Hotpot |

Questions from readers |

Links

Instagram |

Pinterest |

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!