Julie Salamon spent a year hanging out at Maimonides, the hyper-diverse hospital in Brooklyn, and the resulting book is both rigorous and moving. She tells individual patient stories with grace and candor while sketching a big picture portrait of a complex institution with more than 5,000 employees and countless thousands of patients. Following the decidedly bloodless drama of the health care bill, this book presents what American medicine really looks like.

Bio: Alex Halperin is an editor at Guernica. Read his last recommendation of the book The Big Short “here”:https://guernicamag.com/blog/1605/rec_room_alex_halperin_e-readi/.