Books in Brief: Coma

Coma, by Robin Cook (Little, Brown, 306 pp., $8.95). In his second book, Dr. Robin Cook, an ophthalmic surgeon and instructor at Harvard Medical School, writes convincingly, compellingly, of a black market in human organs. Having concluded that he could turn out a best-seller by “dissecting” dozens of suspense and mystery novels, Cook has quite methodically packed his own novel with other authors’ tricks, and sometimes the formulaic quality detracts from the book’s quickening excitement. But by and large this is a horror story of the first order, made to be a movie—one is already in the works, under the direction of Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain)—and it strikes to the core of many people’s queasiness about the current debate as to when death occurs. Karen Anne Quinlan’s heart beats, but her brain is dead; how many other such cases are there, unknown to most of us, and might doctors even create such situations in order to get at the comatose patients’ organs? Cook compresses his action into three days in the life of a young medical student, a woman who uncovers a higher than expected rate of brain death at “Boston Memorial Hospital” and pursues her leads until she comes upon an horrendous medical enterprise. In his final “Author’s Note,” Dr. Cook makes plain his own antagonism to what he calls the legal-medical “mumbo-jumbo whose origins lie in the dark ages of English law” and his preference for the “noble use” of healthy organs. But Coma, a corker of a novel, will do little to advance that cause; it will rather—in addition to giving anyone who picks it up a splendid read— make a lot of jittery folks more than a little more apprehensive about the medical profession in general, and surgical procedures in particular.

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David Brudnoy

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Coma, by Robin Cook (Little, Brown, 306 pp., $8.95). In his second book, Dr. Robin Cook, an ophthalmic surgeon and instructor at Harvard Medical School, writes convincingly, compellingly, of a black market in human organs. Having concluded that he could turn out a best-seller by “dissecting” dozens of suspense and mystery novels, Cook has quite methodically packed his own novel with other authors’ tricks, and sometimes the formulaic quality detracts from the book’s quickening excitement. But by and large this is a horror story of the first order, made to be a movie—one is already in the works, under the direction of Michael Crichton (Andromeda Strain)—and it strikes to the core of many people’s queasiness about the current debate as to when death occurs. Karen Anne Quinlan’s heart beats, but her brain is dead; how many other such cases are there, unknown to most of us, and might doctors even create such situations in order to get at the comatose patients’ organs? Cook compresses his action into three days in the life of a young medical student, a woman who uncovers a higher than expected rate of brain death at “Boston Memorial Hospital” and pursues her leads until she comes upon an horrendous medical enterprise. In his final “Author’s Note,” Dr. Cook makes plain his own antagonism to what he calls the legal-medical “mumbo-jumbo whose origins lie in the dark ages of English law” and his preference for the “noble use” of healthy organs. But Coma, a corker of a novel, will do little to advance that cause; it will rather—in addition to giving anyone who picks it up a splendid read— make a lot of jittery folks more than a little more apprehensive about the medical profession in general, and surgical procedures in particular.