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GAILSTONES HOSTS by Hubert Bagster Kirkus Star

GAILSTONES HOSTS

By

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

(or rather- in the English village of Sallow- population, 1950) has compiled a casebook as entertaining as any you are likely to read as he makes his calls and attends to his consultations in his surgery. A lively human interest brightens all the materia medica from the recurrence of Little Harry's threadworms to the inevitability of Professor Morstan's death. There is the potential local scandal when Delia, the soprano soloist, finds herself pregnant; the intrigue- to which he submits- when he uses Linda, a sex lure, to intercept another romance which will blight a professional future; the haunting enigma of a man's imaginary back-seat passenger who drives him- or with him- to his death; old Mr. Barnes' -he has a much younger, second wife- suspicious stomach ache; Marigold's socially undesirable love affair with a farm boy; June Light's willing servitude to a malingering mother, etc. etc. All these and more offer some ingratiating shoptalk and sidelights on human nature and this doctor's Aesculapian art is enlivened by a sense of humor and of style.