About the Author

Dr. Milton Klein received his B.S. from McGill University and was a Regent Scholar at UC San Diego School of Medicine. Following his residency at the University of Colorado and a cardiology fellowship and assistant professorship at Washington University, he received a British Medical Research Council grant to conduct research at Hammersmith Hospital in London. He later served as Clinical Professor at both Baylor College of Medicine and UT Houston. Over the course of his career, Dr. Klein published numerous research articles and book chapters in the medical literature, as well as two nonfiction books, Learned by Heart: Dialogues with My Father and Handle With Care: A Doctor’s Search for Faith, Fact, and Feeling. His contributions to medicine and medical education were recognized with the Distinguished Service Award from the American Heart Association and the Outstanding Clinical Teaching Award for Interventional Cardiology at UT Houston. He retired in 2012 after thirty-five years in clinical practice.

After retirement, Dr. Klein continued to devote his time and expertise to improving cardiac care in Africa. With a generous retirement gift from a former patient, he procured matching grants from USAID, among others, and helped develop an adult cardiology division in a 900-bed hospital in Tanzania. His work there included establishing quality management committees and best-practice standards, strengthening resident and student teaching curricula, and creating a program to train intensive care unit nurses in cardiology and cardiac surgery. For years, he has also provided remote cardiology consultation to FAME Clinic and Hospital in Karatu, Tanzania, whose founder became one of the inspirations for his first novel, Desperate Measures. A lifelong lover of classical music, Dr. Klein also actively supports young musicians of the National Repertory Orchestra in Breckenridge, Colorado. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Music and Medicine are two of the central themes of Desperate Measures. Dr. Klein has been married to Gail for 54 years and is the proud father of two sons and four grandchildren.