*Thank you to Net Galley and Harper Collins for the advance copy*

Read this book.

A few weeks out of the year Dr. Berkowitz, a neurologist at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, travels to Haiti with Partners in Health, the NGO founded by Dr. Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains), to help the medical team based in Haiti diagnosis and create a treatment plan for their neurology patients. In Haiti, Dr. Berkowitz meets Jamel, a wheel-chair dependent twenty three year old man living with a brain tumor. After conferencing Janel's case with a neurosurgeon back in Boston, they make the decision to bring Jamel to the US for surgery. In this book, Dr. Berkowitz, takes us through every step in the process of arranging medical care in the United States for his patients traveling from Haiti.

This book is about Janel's journey; how he came to the United States, responded to medical interventions, and his socioeconomic challenges in Haiti. But it is also about Dr. Berkowitz's journey as a newly practicing neurologist balancing responsibilities in the US and Haiti, realizing the limitations of health care in resource poor areas, and working to change it.

I may be biased because I live in Boston and I focused on global health work as part of my MPH. While completing my capstone in Ghana, I saw first hand how medical care is delivered in resource poor settings so I was already aware some of the limitations Dr. Berkowitz faced with treating patients in Haiti. It was interesting to read how those limitations were addressed from the perspective of an American physician. He describes surgical procedures in detail from the initial incision to how the tumors affected a patient's functioning, but he also has this ability to connect with the patient's he treats (he speaks Haitian Creole) and describes them in vivid detail.

Dr. Berkowitz is impressive. I feel like I gained a good sense of the work Partners in Health is doing in Haiti and other resource poor countries to treat patients with complex medical needs. This does not read like a medical text or patient case study. Dr. Berkowitz has provided a window into Haitians and their culture. He draws comparisons between the inequality that would relate to those living in a developed country, like the United States. It's an engaging, heartwarming, and educational read. Highly recommend!

Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Even though there are 10,000 NGOs working in Haiti. Haiti has approximately 10 million people. They have 1 neurologist. In the whole country. One CT scan in the whole country. They can diagnose conditions of the brain but for many conditions, especially brain tumors, that's all they can do, diagnose. There is no neurosurgeon. There are 16 CT scans per 50 million poor people in the world. Lives are cheap but medical is not. This book is about a neurologist from Boston who works Partnerships of Health to see patients and train Haitian doctors to recognize and treat common neurological disorders. He develops a working relationship with a Haitian doctor. When back in Boston, the author receives an email from this doctor about a young male patient with a very large brain tumor. The author sees no reason the young man cannot be treated in the U.S. He is warned against this. Too many resources spent on one person he is told. Nonsense says the idealistic young doctor. The book chronicles the time that goes by, the strings that are pulled, the money spent, the surgeries, treatments, and recovery time of this young man. Pull out the kleenex because I teared up more than once.
Haitians are kind, fatalistic, and trust in God. They also trust their doctors implicitly. Unlike Americans, they don't really make their own medical decisions it seems, God and the doctors do. This book covers several other patients also who are helped and two that due before they cannot be helped. Not everything in medicine has a happy ending. Frankly, I don't know how anything can have a happy ending in such grinding poverty. A taxi driver in the book told the doctor out of every 100 people in Haiti only 2-3 of them will eat that day. Partners in health bring self-sustaining self-sufficient hospitals to the poorest places on earth like Haiti, Liberia, Sierra Leone, etc. They use solar panels for electricity. I thought this book would be a downer or depressing but it wasn't. It was hopeful. I especially enjoyed reading all the Haitian proverbs. "A person is a person" "After God is the Doctor" "Many hands make the burden lighter"" Little by little the bird builds it's best"

I found this book to an interesting peek into the life of a neurologist. I learned some about Haiti, a little about neurology, and more about the complex challenges of medically helping people in underdeveloped nations. It was very readable and I kept reading to find out what happened with the patients highlighted in the book.