I am a science and medical writer and the author of Cancer Clinical Trials: Experimental Treatments and How They Can Help You, which is part of O'Reilly & Associates' Patient-Centered Guide Series. I've just finished another book in O'Reilly's Patient-Centered Guides series. This one is titled Organ Transplants: Making the Most of Your Gift of Life. It was published in February 2000, and is available for purchase at Amazon.com. In Organ Transplants I tell the organ recipient, the potential organ recipient, and his or her family what to expect from this life-changing event. Transplant professionals like to say that a transplant does not restore a person to perfect health. On the contrary, the recipient is merely changing one serious medical condition for another. Transplant recipients need to cope with the lifetime responsibility of taking anti-rejection medications, many of which have significant side effects. They have to dodge the twin perils of infection and rejection. They have to deal with the emotional and financial consequences of transplant. Told from the medical consumer's point of view, Organ Transplants will help the recipient cope with this often overwhelming situation.

Here is the Table of Contents for Organ Transplants:

Chapter 1 -- Overview of Organ Transplantation
Chapter 2 -- The System
Chapter 3 -- The Wait
Chapter 4 -- Heart and Lung Transplants
Chapter 5 -- Liver Transplants
Chapter 6 -- Kidney and Pancreas Transplants
Chapter 7 -- Other Transplants (corneas, skin, limbs, intestines, bone marrow)
Chapter 8 -- Anti-Rejection Drugs
Chapter 9 -- Living with a Transplant
Chapter 10 -- Emotional Responses
Chapter 11 -- Family and Support Issues
Chapter 12 -- Transplants in children
Chapter 13 -- Living Donors
Chapter 14 -- Donors and Recipients
Chapter 15 -- Financial Issues
Chapter 16 -- Traveling for Treatment
Chapter 17 -- The Future of Transplantation
Appendix -- Resources

For the perspective of a donor family, you won't find a more eloquent book than The Nicholas Effect. Nicholas Green was only seven years old when he was killed by highway robbers while he and his family were vacationing in Italy. His parents immediately donated his organs, at the time an unusual event in Italy. According to Nicholas's father, Reg Green, his book's title refers to all the wonderful things that have happened (such as a tripling of the organ donation rate in Italy) as a result of this terrible tragedy.
Reg Green, The Nicholas Effect: A Boy's Gift to the World, (Sebastopol: O'Reilly & Associates, 1999), 246 pp.
Order The Nicholas Effect

Until my book came out, the best general reference on organ transplants was:
The Massachusetts General Hospital Organ Transplant Team and H.F. Pizer, Organ Transplants: A Patient's Guide, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 243 pp.
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A gripping book about liver transplants that profiles four patients waiting for the procedure and discusses some of the ethical and political aspects of organ transplantation is:
Scott McCartney, Defying the Gods: Inside the New Frontiers of Organ Transplants, (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1994), 298 pp.
Order Defying the Gods

Two other general books on organ transplantation are:
Lee Gutkind, Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 378 pp.
Order Many Sleepless Nights

Pat Stave Helmberger, Transplants: Unwrapping the Second Gift of Life (Minneapolis: Chronimed Publishing, 1992), 204 pp.
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You'll find the perspective of a living organ donor in this book, written by a woman who donated a kidney to her brother:
Lynn Chabot-Long, A Gift of Life: A Page From the Life of a Living Organ Donor, (Milwaukee: Je-Lynn Publications, 1996), 184 pp.
Order A Gift of Life

Two good books that deal with ethical issues related to organ transplantation:
Arthur L. Caplan and Daniel L. Coelho (editors), The Ethics of Organ Transplants: The Current Debate, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 350 pp.
Order The Ethics of Organ Transplants

Stuart J. Youngner, Renee C. Fox, and Laurence J. O'Connell, (editors), Organ Transplantation: Meanings and Realities (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 290 pp.
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Prednisone is one of the most common immunosuppressive medications taken by organ recipients, and it has many unpleasant side effects. This book will help:
Eugenia Zuckerman and Julie R. Inglefinger, M.D., Coping With Prednisone: It May Work Miracles, But How Do You Handle the Side Effects? (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1997), 208 pp.
Order Coping With Prednisone