In person at Brookline Booksmith! Join us for a discussion on Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER with its author, Dr. Farzon Nahvi, in conversation with Gabrielle Emanuel.

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Code Gray: Death, Life, and Uncertainty in the ER

In the tradition of books by such bestselling physician-authors as Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Danielle Ofri, this beautifully written memoir by an emergency room doctor takes place during one of his routine shifts at an urban ER. Intimately narrated as it follows the experiences of real patients, it is filled with fascinating, adrenaline-pumping scenes of rescues and deaths, and the critical, often excruciating follow-through in caring for the patients’ families.

Centered on the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the ER in sudden cardiac arrest, Code Gray weaves in stories that explore everything from the early days of the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities of our healthcare system. It offers an unforgettable portrait of challenges so profound, powerful, and extreme that normal ethical and medical frameworks prove inadequate. By inviting the reader to experience what it is like to work a shift in the ER from the perspective of a physician, we are forced to test our core beliefs and principles. Often, there are no clear answers to these challenges posed in the ER. We are left feeling unsettled, but through this process, we can come to appreciate just how complicated, emotional, unpredictable­—and yet strikingly beautiful—life can be.

FARZON A. NAHVI is an ER physician at Concord Hospital in Concord, New Hampshire, and a clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Prior to this, he worked as an ER physician and clinical assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System, NYU Langone Health, NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, and the Manhattan VA. He is a graduate of Cornell University and NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily News (New York), New York magazine, and other publications. In April 2019, he testified as an expert witness before Congress in the nation’s first Medicare for All hearing.

GABRIELLE EMANUEL is a senior health reporter at WBUR. Her work has appeared on NPR and This American Life as well as in The New York Times and The Atlantic. She got her doctorate at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.