Often an instant classic and must-read for everyone.ĩ – Superb. A helpful and/or enlightening book that, in addition to meeting the highest standards in all pertinent aspects, stands out even among the best. Here's what the ratings mean:ġ0 – Brilliant. Books we rate below 5 won’t be summarized. Our rating helps you sort the titles on your reading list from solid (5) to brilliant (10). We rate each piece of content on a scale of 1–10 with regard to these two core criteria. Helpful – You’ll take-away practical advice that will help you get better at what you do. Whatever we select for our library has to excel in one or the other of these two core criteria:Įnlightening – You’ll learn things that will inform and improve your decisions. It is Robin Cook, the master of the medical thriller, at his unerring best.Įnjoy more medical mystery thrillers with Chromosome Six, Vector, and Pandemic.At getAbstract, we summarize books* that help people understand the world and make it better. Together they discover that the real explanation behind the killer contagions is even more Machiavellian than could be imagined.Ĭontagion anticipates some of the uncharted consequences of managed health care, in an age when even the wariest consumer may be at risk. Getting at the truth leads to Stapleton's unlikely pairing – both professionally and personally – with Terese Hagen, an art director at a hot Madison Avenue advertising firm. When the apparent epicentres of these outbreaks are revealed to be hospitals and clinics controlled by the same for-profit giant that cannibalized his old ophthalmology practice, Stapleton fears he has stumbled upon a diabolic conspiracy of catastrophic proportions: Could the for-profit giant be engaged in the systematic elimination of its more costly subscribers? Stapleton thinks he is past pain and past caring, but as a series of virulent and extremely lethal illnesses – capped by a particularly deadly outbreak of a rare strain of influenza – strikes the young, the old, and the innocent, his suspicions are aroused. Feeling less the golden boy than a jaded cynic, Stapleton retrains in forensic pathology and relocates to find an uneasy niche for himself in a city that suits his changed perspective: the cold, indifferent, concrete maze of New York.

John Stapleton's life is transformed to ashes. The story of a deadly epidemic spread not merely by microbes but by sinister sabotage – a terrifying cautionary tale for the millennium as the health care giants collide.Īfter he loses first his Midwestern ophthalmology practice to a for-profit medical giant and then his family to a commuter airline tragedy, Dr.

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