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THE MAN WHO HAD EVERYTHING by Donald M. Murray

THE MAN WHO HAD EVERYTHING

By

Pub Date: June 22nd, 1964
Publisher: New American Library

Living the good suburban life, personable, popular Brad Hastings has everything until he becomes nothing from the neck down-- an accident makes a quadriplegic of him. This then is the grim medical chart of the physical indignities endured as he spends months in a frame; it also follows with assiduous realism his alienation from his wife, his children, his friends- among them his doctor. He tunes everyone out and narrows the world to a bed in the ward. Although at first he attempts to contradict the verdict (minimal movement in one hand will be the extent of his recovery), he finally gives up hope for a miracle and isolates himself in the County Home for the Crippled and the Incurable with the other ""living failures."" At the close his partial reconciliation to the life he will have to live is reached... Clinically blunt and often explicit to the point of recoil, this also indirectly suggests some of the live coal issues involved (when the doctor wins and the patient loses, is suicide justified?) while retaining a residual sympathy for all concerned.