Marie Brenner With Daniela Lamas: A Conversation

Daniela Lamas, M.D., is a pulmonary and critical care doctor at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital and faculty at Harvard Medical School. She has worked as a medical reporter at the Miami Herald and is frequently published in The New York Times. In her first book, You Can Stop Humming Now: A Doctor’s Stories of Life, Death, and in Between (Little, Brown Spark), Lamas writes about what life is like for patients kept alive by modern medical technology. As a critical care doctor treating people at their sickest, she questions what comes after for those whose lives are extended by treatments and technologies. She explores the complex answers through personal accounts of patients and their families.

Marie Brenner is the author of more than half a dozen books and a writer at large for Vanity Fair. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker, a contributing editor at New York, and has won numerous awards for her reporting around the world. Her exposé of the tobacco industry was the basis for the 1999 movie The Insider. She also produced the 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? COVID-19 arrived in New York City in the spring of 2020. As America’s largest metropolis engaged in a war against the virus, it became apparent that the death count could be in the hundreds of thousands. Brenner had unprecedented 18-month access to the entire New York-Presbyterian hospital system, and in The Desperate Hours: One Hospital’s Fight to Save a City on the Pandemic’s Front Lines (Flatiron Books), she takes readers inside secure ICU units, sealed operating rooms, locked executive suites, unknown basement workshops, and makeshift clinics, providing extraordinary witness to the front line of the war. It is an intimate portrait of courageous men and women – doctors, nurses, residents, researchers, and suppliers – coming together in their devotion to duty, their families, each other, and the city they love.