Robert Klitzman

In-depth explorations of the fascinating world of hospital chaplains  (Forthcoming from Oxford University Press - Publication date Sept. 2024).

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"In this insightful, though-provoking book, Klitzman illuminates how patients find and maintain hope when facing serious ailments. As a physician, researcher and writer, he masterfully weaves together gripping stories of doctors, patients and chaplains, and recent research demonstrating how hope and spirituality positively affect human health.  This remarkable book shows how physicians need to be equally aware of the human spirit." 

 –Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize Winner and author of Song of the Cell
 
"Robert Klitzman limns the ways that medicine fails to satisfy the spiritual yearning in most people. Science explains a great deal, but the central questions of existence lie outside its purview, and Klitzman eloquently reveals the heroism of chaplains who address this gap."

–Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

"This engrossing book shines a light on the key role hospital chaplains can play in helping doctors care for their patients. The book is essential reading for anyone who has ever been sick or looked after someone who was—which is to say, for everyone."

–Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club

"Klitzman's account of the place of chaplaincy in medicine contributes importantly to the clinical care of the whole person. This book provides an on-the-ground depiction of what chaplains in the hospital contribute, and what clinicians can learn."

– Arthur Kleinman, author of The Soul of Care

"Klitzman brings into view the stories and experiences of patients, chaplains, and healthcare providers grappling with religious, spiritual, and existential questions in healthcare. I highly recommend this book."

–Wendy Cadge, author of Paging God

"Drawing on extensive interviews and research, Klitzman adds immeasurably to our understandings of spirituality and religion in medicine.  This groundbreaking book helps point the way toward more compassionate and holistic care."

– Harold Koenig, Director, Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health, Duke University

"Well-researched and rigorous yet highly readable, this study of reproductive liberty will assist patients on their journey through the infertility maze and enlighten general readers about this ever-changing industry."--Library Journal

In this intelligent, rigorous book, Robert Kiltzman looks at the morality of morality—at how the bodies set up to protect research subjects can end up injuring us all. This examination of our confused notions of safety, honesty, and transparency demonstrates that none of these is simple, and that in striving toward any one, we easily betray the others. It is a book about how seeking to do the right thing can lead to justice, and about how equally often it fails to do so.

- Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree (National Book Critics Circle Award winner), and Noonday Demon ( National Book Award winner)

"In Am I My Genes?, the psychiatrist and ethicist Dr. Robert L. Klitzman plunges readers into the world of genomic medicine as it exists today: a barely mapped terrain of immense overlapping uncertainties...this book should make compelling reading for anyone considering genetic testing for these or any other conditions: It provides an instant community of fellow travelers along with a sophisticated moderator." --New York Times

In Mortal Secrets, Klitzman and Bayer explore how we weigh the benefits of secrecy against the hazards of truth telling. This is a timeless question that is destined to become more and more important as the incidence of HIV rises. I was moved by the wonderful voices captured in this book, the voices of people wrestling with issues that are at the core of relationships; Mortal Secrets is illuminating and groundbreaking.
―Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

"it is a story of a young man coming of age in a culture which is far removed from his own. The author is frank about his feelings and intelligent in his musings, and it gives the book the universal and timeless charm of a classic." - Associated Press

"Between his undergraduate years at Princeton and medical school at Yale, Klitzman spent a year conducting basic epidemiological research in Papua, New Guinea. Here, as in his books covering his medical internship (A Year-Long Night) and psychiatric training (In a House of Dreams and Glass), he presents an engaging autobiographical account of his experiences. Working for Nobel Prize-winner (Physiology/Medicine, 1976) Carleton Gajdusek in 1981, Klitzman lived amid the Fore, a previously cannibalistic tribe in some of the most remote parts of the country. Their community had been devastated by kuru, a deadly and heartbreaking neurological disease, spread by the ritual consumption of deceased relatives (including brain matter). Over the course of the narrative, the young Klitzman interviews stricken individuals, comes to grips with hugely divergent cultures and comes of age himself. What gives kuru additional and timely import, and makes it more than just an odd tropical malady, is that it appears to be closely related to Mad Cow disease...a briskly engaging and informative work."

"An unforgettable picture of what extremity looks like...intense."

"I know of no higher praise than to name a book necessary. Being Positive is that and more.

"There are extraordinary moments…[The book] describe[s] the tension between the endless stress and the fantastic learning curve of his 'Year-long Night'"—Washington Post

"A Yale Medical School graduate, Klitzman joins the ranks of young doctors whose emotionally charged first year of internship impels them to record their initial experiences of suffering, healing and death. Each of his medical rotations is represented by short episodes, usually centered around a single patient. Indeed, what distinguishes this account from others of its kind is not only literary promise, but the author's interest in patients as human beings with distinct personalities whose identities and wishes he respectsqualities that should serve him well in his present residency in psychiatry at a New York hospital. A particularly interesting chapter is devoted to a year spent in a New Guinea village researching a disease linked with cannibalism."