Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life

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Synopsis
Lightning Flowers weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible — &“utterly spectacular.&” (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises) What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.
Copyright:
2020

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
288 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780316450355
Related ISBNs:
9780316450362
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Katherine E. Standefer
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Law, Legal Issues and Ethics, Medicine
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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