"This book is self-knowledge. Who you were, how you changed, what remains..." This is how the author modestly defines the task of his memoirs, although he has every right to a higher assessment of such a long and vibrant life. The memoirs of N. M. Amosov are a piercing, very personal confession and at the same time a voluminous portrait of the era: the war, the hopes of the sixties, medical discoveries that shook the world, again the hopes and disappointments of the late eighties, meetings, “voices” and living portraits of contemporaries - outstanding surgeons S. S. Yudin, A. N. Bakulev, A. A. Vishnevsky, academician Sakharov, politicians and cultural figures.