Catching Babies is an inside look at the industry that brings our babies into this world. It's a harsh world for doctors who work to make sure that every baby has a soft landing. Insightful. Gripping. Wonderful. - Lisa Sanders, MD, Author, "Diagnosis" Column for The New York Times Magazine & Every Patient Tells a Story
A most remarkable aspect of birth is how this normal and simple act is frequently neither. In Catching Babies, Kleinke powerfully demonstrates how birth, despite advanced technologies and medical interventions, remains the center of our common human experience - usually the greatest of joys yet also tainted with occasions of unavoidable loss and misery. If ignorance is bliss, then how are young physicians molded by the realities of daily struggles to avert life's ultimate cruelties? As someone who has lived this life for twenty years, I wept often at how accurately Catching Babies portrays the elations and internal private fears shared by the women and men who dedicate their lives to serving women's health, with complex motivations, variable results and often at high cost to themselves and their families. Catching Babies also exposes the current complexities that hinder bringing balance back to a birth experience that is too often polarized. For those who want safer and more satisfying health for women, this book is a must read. - James Byrne, MD, OB/GYN Chair, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center & Clinical Associate Professor, Maternal Fetal Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine
If you think Grey's Anatomy is shallow, House ridiculous, and you can't keep track of who's doing whom on Private Practice, you should read Catching Babies. J.D. Kleinke has done one of the hardest things imaginable - taken a swath of health policy, medical care issues, and ethics - and surrounded it in a novel I could not put down. On the other hand, if you love those TV medical dramas, read Catching Babies now so you can complain knowingly to your friends when Hollywood messes up the characters and the medicine in the inevitable-to-come TV series. - Matthew Holt, Co-Founder, Health 2.0 & Founder, The Health Care Blog
Noted health care economist J.D. Kleinke uses the vehicle of a riveting novel to nail the American health care mess. Deeply flawed but compelling medical figures rip raw the deeply flawed American social construct, the deeply flawed medical profession, and the deeply flawed health care system through the unforgiving prism of that most elemental human activity: sexual reproduction. - George D Lundberg, MD, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 1982-1999
Combining romance with political intrigue and sharp insights into healthcare delivery, economist-turned-novelist Kleinke has created a page-turner. - Peter Frishauf, Founder, Medscape
The academic medical center is the largest, most complicated stage in our health care system, and Kleinke is its master dramatist. Catching Babies humanizes the manic energy and impenetrable culture of our teaching hospitals, showing us the best and worst of how we are training the next generation of specialist-physicians, often within the same few breaths. This may be the great American medical novel. - George D. Pillari, Co-Founder, Solucient
