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Sheri Fink on Five Days at Memorial
Fink discusses the six-year investigation behind her book on Hurricane Katrina's aftermath.
Quick facts
War · Medicine
War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival
Fink’s debut reconstructs the experience of doctors and nurses at a hospital in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, who continued performing surgery under siege during the genocide, cut off from supplies and reinforcements, making impossible triage decisions as the war closed in around them.
Drawing on Fink’s own background as a former relief worker in conflict zones as well as her MD and PhD from Stanford, War Hospital established the questions she’d return to throughout her career: what medical professionals owe their patients when every normal resource and protection has collapsed.
Investigative · MedicineOn my shelf
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
A landmark investigation into what happened at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when floodwaters, heat, and failing power forced exhausted staff to decide which patients to evacuate first — and, months later, led to criminal allegations that some caregivers had deliberately hastened patients’ deaths.
The culmination of six years of reporting, including Fink’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 ProPublica/New York Times Magazine investigation, this book won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and half a dozen other honors. It was later adapted into an Apple TV+ series. Fink, a physician herself, never lets the reader settle into easy judgment of the impossible choices the staff faced.
Frequently asked questions about Sheri Fink’s books
From the bookshelf
“In a way, the story of Memorial is the story of what happens when the systems we count on fail, and human beings are left to make decisions no one should have to make alone.”
— Sheri Fink, on Five Days at Memorial
For more investigative journalism that sits with impossible decisions rather than easy judgment, browse the full shelf.
