THE “NO STRINGS ATTACHED BOOK CLUB”
SPONSORED BY THE SOCIAL COMMITTEE OF THE PTOS

"Five Days at Memorial" by Sheri Fink

“Five Days at Memorial is Sheri Fink’s elaborately researched chronicle of life, death, and the choices in between at a New Orleans hospital immediately following Hurricane Katrina. What’s important, it slowly emerges, is that despite Fink’s painstaking re-creation based on five hundred interviews and mountains of documents—we weren’t there. We cannot know. Fink, under the guise of third-person journalistic objectivity, drives us towards a kind of uncertainty so great that it’s revelatory. There are conclusions to be drawn from Fink’s collection of dilemmas. She seems to indicate that she believes “a crime had occurred.” The scope of that crime—not just a legal trespass but a moral and ethical one as well—is the true subject of this book. This isn’t just a policy brief ornamented with characters. It is, like all great journalism, a document unto itself, an artifact of what we thought about “life and death” issues in the early twenty-first century.”—Jeff Sharlet

August 8, 2017 (Tuesday)
4:30-5:30 PM
REMSEN CONFERENCE ROOM 3D44
FOR INFORMATION CONTACT
LYNN BRISTOL: LYNN.BRISTOL@USPTO.GOV