Dr. Atul Gawande's second book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, is due out this week in the U.S., reports The New York Times.

His first book, Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, came out in 2003.

Gawande is a former Rhodes scholar and writes like a dream. Knowing his principal metier like he does makes the resulting prose highly entertaining. He is 41 years old and takes an iPod into the operating theatre with him. “You can’t play anything hard-hitting if there’s anyone over 45” he says.