Danielle Ofri
photo by Joon Park

 

 

 

Incidental Findings
Reviews: the critics

New York Times Book Review
Ofri's thoughtful and honest second book...is equal parts The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Kitchen Confidential.
— Read the full review.

New England Journal of Medicine
Incidental Findings is a beautiful book. Ofri has enough faith in her patients, her profession, and herself to tell it all.

Booklist
...exceptional series of introspective essays.... The musings seem drawn from her very marrow and too personally raw to be originally intended for broad distribution.  “In the end,” she concludes, “medicine will always be about one patient and one physician together in one room, connecting through the most basic of communication systems: touch.”  Good writing + good doctor = good reading.
— Read the full review.

Psychology Today
    Dr. Ofri, a physician, distills wisdom from the maelstrom of New York City's Bellevue Hospital in this emotional memoir. In a series of poignant vignettes, the internist grapples with the hearts of the sick, literally and metaphorically. Her patients range from the terminally ill to manipulative hypochondriacs, from veiled Bangledeshi women to convicted felons. A must-read for students of psychology and medicine in need of a lesson in compassion.

Kirkus Reviews
     A second collection of perceptive essays about Ofri's continuing growth as physician, fulfilling the promise of Singular Intimacies...     A pleasure to read, thanks to the author's ability to see her patients as individuals and to form a genuine connection with them.
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Publisher's Weekly
     Ofri... again displays the same sensitivity and carefully crafted writing that distinguished her first medical memoir (Singular Intimacies).  The emphasis in these 14 engrossing pieces is on her determination to learn from those she has treated.
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JAMA
    The writing is engaging, and I highly recommend Incidental Findings to anyone who wants to read a short, well-written, and thought-provoking book.

Prairie Schooner
 
 [Ofri] understands illness as a narrative and the stethoscope as a device that is sometimes essential to the story and sometimes not. She engages the full arsenal of myth and science, and this makes her a powerful present-day shaman....
    Ofri’s essays are nearly all meditations in humility. Given what Atul Gawande has styled as “medicine’s twenty-first century, tall-in-the-saddle confidence,” her book is a cultural miracle. Reading Ofri is like watching a U.S. Marine weep.
— Read the full review.

 

Incidental Findings is published by Beacon Press, a nonprofit, independent book publisher since 1854.

You can order from Amazon.