The summer book club started in 2015, with one of the best books we have done in book club, Atul Gawande's Being Mortal. I think it should be required reading for all physicians. So now, in 2025, it is the NephJC Summer Book’s tenth anniversary (which represents our eleventh book). The history has been rich:
2024 Abraham Verghese The Covenant of Water
2023 Perry Wilson How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't
2022 Walter Isaacson The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
2021 Joshua D Mezrich When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon
2020 Rana Awdish’s In Shock
2019 Andrew Bomback’s Doctor (Object Lessons)
2018 Siddhartha Mukherjee's Laws of Medicine, Field Notes from an Uncertain Science
2017 Vanessa Grubb's Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers
2016 Eric Topol's The Patient Will See You Now
2015 Atul Gawande's Being Mortal
Take a look at the blog tag Book Club. Lots of posts, over lots of years.
And this year, we have John Green’s Everything is Tuburculosis, which after last year’s The Covenant of Water, is a return to our non-fiction roots. Despite being non-fiction it fits the bill of being a summer read. It is fast-paced, and a page-turner. Of course, I am a John Green Fan. I love his use of clever dialog to add intelligence to Young Adult fiction. His breakthrough novel, Fault in Our Stars, was published in 2012, at that time my twins were in the heart of young adult fiction and devoured it. My wife and I followed suit. The whole family really liked it. And on a subsequent trip to Europe we found the Amsterdam bench made famous in the film adaptation.
I became a huge fan of the Anthropocene Reviewed Podcast. In fact, I think that Everything is Tuberculosis feels very much like an extension of the same writing style. It is a style that I love. So I was positioned to like this book, and I did. I think it is a worthy addition to our summer book club.
Join us on Tuesday, at 9 pm to discuss this year’s edition of the NephJC Summer Book Club.