“This book succeeds in exposing hospitals as complicated and contradictory institutions.” —Journal of the American Medical Association [password required]
In The New York Times Book Review, D.T. Max notes that Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, the setting of the book, “sits on the fault lines of two national controversies, immigration and health care.” The subject might seem dry, he says, “but this is not a dry book,” it is full of emotion and drama. He calls Hospital “ambitious,” “absorbing,” “funny” and “sobering.” —New York Times Book Review
“I’ve never had much interest in hospitals (or been able to sit through an episode of ‘ER’), but as Salamon expertly sucked me into the saga of Maimonides, I realized this was about more than white coats, scalpels and beeping consoles. This place was 21st century America in a microcosm.” — Laura Miller, Salon (lead review)
“...go with her behind the scenes of the health-care system, where her style and acute observations illuminate a world patients rarely see... fascinating chaos.” — Bloomberg News
“The fine grain of Ms. Salamon’s observations allows her to paint a compelling—and damning—portrait of a dysfunctional health-care system… Its careful documentation of financial crises, feuds, personality clashes and, most of all, life-and-death drama it feeds the same appetite for pathos, intrigue, tragedy and redemption…as the current plethora of medical programs.”— Economist
“Maimonides Medical Center, in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, is a poster child for the modern hospital, and Julie Salamon has painted the poster with a colorful literary flair that has become her trademark as a journalist and author....she takes you up nad down the corridors of a microcosm of American medicine in all its glory and infamy.” —The New Leader [pdf]
“...a well-written piece of investigative journalism that...provides an unvarnished look at how a major medical center comes to terms with the patients, families, and community it serves....Salamon, a journalist and book author, is able to chronicle the serious and the ridiculous...fascinating insights...grounded in emotion, science, and in the financial realities of today. The candor of the people discussed in this book is refreshing.” —Angelo P. Giardino, MD, PhD, Medscape [password required]
“She has written a book that reads like a novel, elicits equal parts dismay and awe, yet never wavers from truth-telling...What she gives us is an all-too-human institution, flawed, restless, protean, bursting with life. ” — Dan Cryer, Newsday
“Salamon goes beyond the sharp conflicts of ego, culture, and competition in a hospital and finds a community still rooted in compassion and caring. A unique and revealing book that captures the tensions and triumphs of today’s medicine.” — Dr. Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think
“There’s ‘ER,’ there’s ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ and then there’s this real, true-life drama of the barely controllable chaos that actually rules in a huge metropolitan hospital, by one of America’s best fly-on-the-wall reporters, Julie Salamon.” — Tom Wolfe, author of I Am Charlotte Simmons
“Author Julie Salamon draws the participants and dozens of other characters in such detail that she can return to them a hundred pages later without having to remind readers who they are. She tackles issues like the treatment of the uninsured and the implementation of new technology with a fluid grace.” — The Onion/A.V. Club
“[A] remarkable portrait… Salamon succeeds in providing a completely unique, three-dimensional and compellingly human perspective of the demanding work—both frustrating and rewarding that is not always apparent to hospital patients and their families.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Reading HOSPITAL feels a little like watching one of those speeding-gurney sequences on ER — fast pasted, high stakes, and crowded with colorful characters all shouting at once. The difference is that Julie Salamon’s book is more informative, more nuanced, and closer to reality....Ultimately, HOSPITAL is immensely heartening. If there is hope for our overburdened healthcare system, Salamon’s book suggests, we can thank the decent, thoughtful men and women laboring overtime to improve the quality of life—and death—in our gloriously lumpy American melting pot.” —Francine Prose, O Magazine
“It would seem a fine time to burrow into the inner workings of an American hospital, which is what Julie Salamon has done...a solid piece of reportage. In the end, you come to admire the book’s principal figures, as Ms. Salamon does, however flawed they might be. The physicians and administrators, she makes clear, ‘tried to remember—against the odds posed by a greedy and corrupted health-care system and by institutional and human frailty—that healing was the heart of the matter.’” — Wall Street Journal
“Call it a chaos-theory analysis of the hospital...a complex combination of individuals, egos, interests and cultures all rubbing up against each other, creating sparks...Ms. Salamon comes off as an unusually balanced observer, at once loving and critical.” — Lizzy Ratner, The New York Observer
“Impressively reported and vividly written...” — Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week
“Superb....Salamon comes close to breaking her readers’ hearts...in that good, gratifying way that only a true story, nobly told, can do. ” — Karen Long, book editor, The Plain Dealer
“...terrific book. It ought to be required reading for anyone about to undergo surgery.” — Deseret News
“Julie Salamon is simply one of our best writers. Her
keen reportorial eye, her vivid and assured prose, and most of all, the
tremendous compassion she shows for the people in her story, are on full
display in “Hospital.” Here is an institution at the crossroads of humanity,
into which Salamon inserted herself for a full year, capturing personal
details of remarkable intimacy as well as the sweep of a great story.”
— James B. Stewart, author of Den of Thieves
“Salamon knows how to weave a story well, and here she weaves many stories with drama and grace.” — BookPage [pdf]
“...the professionals speak with amazing candor throughout, and this is part of why ‘Hospital’—with its mix of cultural reportage and adrenalized drama—is such a good read..” — Sara Eckel, Time Out
New York
“Like distant generals, our presidential candidates plot their health care strategies while war rages in the trenches of America's hospitals and clinics. Julie's Salamon's Hospital is an urgent, unsentimental dispatch from one of those urban battlefields...balanced, not polemical, ably exposing the fault lines in a system beginning to crack under the strain” — Shelf Awareness, June 3, 2008
