The epilogue is the best chapter.

Structure first. There are two halves and they aren't equal. The first covers a young man deciding between literature and medicine, and it's competent and a little studied; I put three pink tabs where the reading list is doing work the sentences should be doing. The second half, from the diagnosis onward, operates at a different level entirely, and the change is sharp enough that you can put a thumb on the page where it happens.

He is very good on the specifics of the job. The chapter about learning to hand bad news to a family, and the older surgeon who tells him he's been doing it wrong, carries more useful content than most books written about medicine from outside it.

The epilogue was not written by him, and it's the best-written thing here. I want to say that plainly rather than gently, because it deserves saying: his wife's forty pages are steadier, more particular, and less anxious about their own significance than the two hundred that come before them.

An eight. I read it in three sittings and then didn't start anything else for four days, which is unlike me, since I usually have the next one lined up before I've finished the current one.