A grim reproof to all who want to deny that AIDS has arrived in America's heartland. For five years in the late 1980s, Verghese was an infectious- diseases specialist in Johnson City, a town in northeastern Tennessee; in that time he saw his AIDS patient load soar from 1 to more than 80. AIDS was brought to Johnson City by way of New York, San Francisco, Miami, and elsewhere by prodigal gay sons who, after a few years of freedom, returned home to die. It was brought by way of a truck stop on the interstate where gay locals congregated for anonymous sex. It was brought by way of transfusions of tainted blood. With the observant—but never dispassionate—eye of the clinician, Verghese notes everything about the remarkable, varied patients who seek his help, including: Will Johnson, a Bible Belt entrepreneur who believes AIDS comes from Satan; Luther Hines, whose bitter rage keeps him alive while his body is consumed by tuberculosis, candidiasis, and other infections; Vickie McCray, who faithfully cares for the unfaithful husband who infected her as he sinks into AIDS dementia. Verghese leaves nothing to the imagination as he describes the gruesome effects of the opportunistic infections that attack those with AIDS. He surprises us with unpredictable instances of compassion (friends changing diapers on a man with uncontrollable diarrhea) and cruelty (from members of the medical profession). But this is also Verghese's personal story, which dovetails with that of his patients. As a foreign-born doctor of Indian descent tending outcast patients, he too was a bit of an outsider in rural Tennessee. He is touchingly honest about his own flaws and about the strain his all-consuming medical practice placed on his marriage. Verghese, who has written for the New Yorker and other publications, offers a powerful testimony to the courage of those who live and die with AIDS and of those who care for them. (Book- of-the-Month Club alternate selection; Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-78514-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1994
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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