Five Days At Memorial Chapter Summary

Words: 847
Pages: 4

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital This book, written by journalist Sheri Fink, is a description of the miserable aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when it struck the Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. The book was based off an article the Fink wrote for the New York Times in 2009. It talks about the number of people in the hospital at the time of the hurricane, and the long, laborious effort put in by hospital workers, their families, and various volunteers to evacuate patients and civilians. On the second day after the hurricane, the town flooded, leaving the first floor of the hospital underwater, and generators failing. Diesel generators provided partial electricity, then by day four even those quit running …show more content…
The text did not really have an intended audience, I feel like the audience was everyone. It had a different story from several different doctors, nurses, patients, and family members of both doctors and patients. Being able to see all the different sides of the story really left it up to the reader to form their own opinion on what happened at Memorial Medical Center after Hurricane Katrina. In some cases, the reader has the potential to get lost, due to the depth of the information, and the amount of different characters to keep track of. I do believe that all the characters in the book were necessary to go as in depth as Fink did and tell the complete story. Dr. Ana Pou was one of the characters the book kept coming back too, this is because Pou was a very respected head and neck surgeon that was arrested by the state of Louisiana for alleged crimes. I don’t think there is a single thing that Fink could have researched more. This book was so in depth, I think it was almost too thorough. In my opinion, I think that less would have been more in some parts of the book. The reader could very easily get lost during some of the dry parts of the book when Fink goes too far in explaining things like the generators, and why they wouldn’t work, or the Tenet Corporation, and how they were not helpful at