Rating: 
Summary: One of the best memoirs I've ever read
Review: With the eye, ear and voice of a novelist and with the compassion of a healer, Dr. Abraham Verghese has taken his experiences as "the AIDS doctor" of east Tennessee and turned them into an incredible memoir. This is one of the most touching and engrossing books I've read in years.When Verghese landed in Johnson City, Tennessee in 1985, he came as a newly-accredited infectious diseases specialist to treat veterans, most of whom had lung cancer and emphysema, and to spend one day a week in the town medical center he learned to call the "Miracle Center". When the center's first AIDS patient entered the hospital, it was the beginning of the plague which would soon extend across the country, not just in the big city locales where the majority of homosexual men and drug abusers lived. They were coming home to die. Because the young doctor had a strong desire to help and an ability to tolerate the differences of others, he gradually found himself almost obsessed with caring for his patients. He loved them as people, and as they began to die, he mourned. They were on his mind constantly, even when he was home with his beautiful wife and small sons to the point where his marriage and the center of his home became endangered by his devotion to a setting and to people which excluded them. This book is so beautifully written I could not put it down. Each patient became fully alive for me, thanks to Verghese's ability to describe them, and I, too, mourned them as they passed. This is a memoir I will not soon forget. Poignant in its humanity, staggering in the scope of its tragedy, it will remain Verghese's monument to Tennessee and the people he came to love in all their variety. Wonderful book.
Rating:
Summary: richly detailed book full of suspense, sorrow, and humor
Review: The author of this book is an Indian doctor, working at a hospital in Johnson city, Tennessee, at the start of the AIDS epidemic. His account is of being the only infectious diseases physician in a rural community at a time when the first wave of HIV-positive gay men were returning to their hometowns from New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. His observations of the men and women who come to him for care, and the relationships that have grown between them, are insightful and vivid. Though he is heterosexual and married with two small children, his intuitive compassion for people with AIDS is a lesson in what it is to be nonjudgmental. However, the crisis for him is to live in a place and time where his curiosity and compassion are shared by almost no one else, both within and outside his professional community. Through his work, he comes to a deeper understanding of homophobia and the irrationality that drives people's fear of disease and disability. As an African-born Indian, happily Americanized, he finds in the social isolation of his patients something of his own status as an "outsider." We also see the demands that professional commitments can make on marriage and parenting. An outgoing and obviously dedicated, self-sacrificing physician, the author is slowly overcome by the growing solitude of his professional and personal journey and the weariness of battling a disease with no cure. Although sometimes a triumph of dignity against all odds, the deaths of his patients are heart-breaking. This is a richly detailed book full of suspense, sorrow, and humor and beautifully written.
Rating:
Summary: My Own Country, my home town.
Review: This book is an amazing way to discover the hardships that those must over come who are diagnosed with HIV and AIDS. I am from Johnson City, TN. As a part of a clinical I was doing in high school we were given many options of books to read for a grade, this was one. I was drawn to it because hey, this was my home town. But what I got from this book overcame everything I had expected. I wept reading this book. It is amazing how you get to know Dr. Verghese and his patients. You, in a way, experience their hardships and triumps, even the families loss. He explains word for word the exhausting battle of finding out and forming a plan of action. He puts you into the realization of these individuals and what they felt. You begin to morn their loosing battles and celebrate in their strength in recovery. He discribes this area of Tennessee with such effortless ease. It's beauty struck with something so horrid. Reading the book I forgot that this was my home, the people in it were people of my town. For a nieve high school student it made me realize that no matter what the year was this was real and it was here in my own back yard. "My Own Country." I learned more than just about the people or about the land but the medical terminology was explained and he made you the reader understand what it meant to him and the world of medicine. Each detail will make you feel like you are right there in the ER of the "Miracle Center". There were times I just could not put this book down. I have read it three times now and I am starting my fourth. The stories in this book of the patients are tragic. Anyone who has any type of preconceived notion of what it is like to have AIDS/HIV or what "kind of people" have AIDS/HIV should read this book. It will open your eyes to a whole new world. This story of our small town, as it was then, has reached all over the world. It has inspired and educated everyone who has read it. I'm sure that it still means a great deal to the families of those in it. AIDS will always be scary, it will always be something that will cause pain and horror to our ears, this book describes a small town with prejudice of it's own before a time of AIDS and how it conforms to another way of thinking. Just like in this book, not everyone will ever be accepting of those who contract this disease but everyone will be made aware of it. I suggest this book to any reader with any reading taste. You will walk away with much more than what you came with. You will get to know our people and their stories from the mind of a man who knew them all. Abraham Verghese was brilliant in writing this collection of lives on paper. Thank you Dr. Verghese for letting their voices be heard all over the world and inspiring those who take time to indulge in your brilliance.
Rating:
Summary: Well written
Review: This is one of the best books I have read from an Indian author. The book is haunting in its description of the AIDS disease and compassionate as well. By the end of the book, I found myself wondering about the various characters and how many of them are still surviving. The description of the disease and the death that resulted from it was so graphic that it left a haunting impression on me. Reading this book gave me a new appreciation for all the research done in trying to overcome this disease. As an immigrant Indian living in the States, I found the description of the Indian life style very accurate and amusing. Dr. Verghese, if you are as good a doctor as you are a writer, I think your patients are fortunate to have you as their physician.
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Summary: Killing AIDS prejudice
Review: I read this book when it first came out, and I even was lucky enough to attend a reading by the author in a rural bookstore of North Carolina, which was a perfect setting for a reading from a book whose locale is the rural areas East of North Carolina. I even had the book signed, the things you do sometimes... It is a truly beautiful book. If not great litterature, it is certainly a well written memoir that reads like a novel. But it is not fiction. One sees the progressive changes in the mood of the Doctor as his sense of duty slowly but surely affect his work and his family life. But most important of all, if this book does not cure you from AIDS prejudice, nothing will.
Rating:
Summary: An incredible story
Review: This book focusses on a common humanizing theme by comparing many different kinds of discrimination. Fear of Aids, homophobia, and perpetual foreigness are the author's 3 main themes. Using his experiences as a doctor, Verghese is able to go into detail about many of his patients, most of which have AIDS. This anecdotal format serves the author well, as the reader becomes drawn into every individual story.
One note, this book does not censor any medical details. If you want to learn the hard facts about AIDS, than this is your book. The disease strikes indiscriminately, not just infecting the homosexual population. Learning the stories of his patients, understanding their motivations and hopes, and finally reading about them getting sick and dying is a moving experience for any true reader.
Most importantly, this is a true story. What one reads about here actually happened. The stereotypes, naked prejudices, and hate were all and still are in some respects a part of American culture and society. Despite this negative atmosphere, the book does offer hope for integration and understanding. Even though the disease killed people from all walks of life, it also brought them together. It let them see each other as fellow humans, not just homosexuals or minorities. Thus, it is definently an uplifting tale, bringing hope and life out of death and despair.
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Summary: Haunting memoirs from the trenches of a distant front
Review: Foreign-born physicians, especially South Asian ones such as the author of this remarkable memoir, frequently are perceived as even more arrogant, distant, and smug about their high status and income in rural areas than are urban, American-born ones. Verghese, who grew up in Ethiopia and who finished medical school in his (Christian) parents' homeland of India, clearly describes the allocation of medical personnel in the US. He also understands the resentments by those of old stock, poor white patient of affluent foreign-born doctors. As the title indicates, Verghese wanted to feel at home where he chose to settle, to provide his sons a sense of belonging in one place, a sense that he had not had in his own peripatetic life. Like his patients, however, he was never certain that seeming acceptance was was more than provisional. This insightful, lyrical, and moving book provides a vivid account of being an alien doctor in rural America dealing with a terrifying disease that was (and is) also perceived as alien, as something that, in the view of many, other kinds of people contract and probably deserve. Acute analyses of American (including Asian-American) arrangements and assumptions underlie a poignant narrative of AIDS coming to the northeastern Tennessee hills. Verghese shares Oliver Sacks's ability to engage readers in the horror and the mystery of sufferings for which physicians have no magic bullets. As Paul Farmer, another physician who made a difference, showed in _AIDS and Accusation_, how a society responds to AIDS illuminates much about the society, not only how medical services are organized and financed in it. Verghese shows strengths as well as weaknesses in rural Southeastern American backwaters. He also illuminates connections from such seemingly isolated places to the larger society and ties of blood to distant urban centers where gay men sought refuge.
Rating: 
Summary: Humanity is Second to Science as the Basis of Good Medicine
Review: It's clear from the cover picture that "My Own Country" is not about your idealized American county doctor. Abraham Verghese is dark skinned, could be a native of a third world country's medical school or a graduate of an American off shore medical school where medical students are recruited and trained to help fill staff shortages in American hospitals. Except, the surprise in this beautifully written autobiographical medical story is the, oftentimes, experimental science lesson behind the medicine. Verghese is as well trained in his medical style as any American phyician, (he is Indian) with the emphasis being on "training". It seems like Verghese spends most of his professional career training for his next medical puzzlement. Thankfully, at least according to Verghese's account, medical practitioners attempt to be oblivious about their race or most other humanly distinctive features because the science of the profession overrides their quest to cure. Describing his life in almost parellel segments, Verghese seems to compartmentalize his family from his professional self in the style of the 24 hour medical man with Johns Hopkins or Bellevue credentials. In "My Own Country", Verghese eventually seems to finds peace between his ethnicity, nationality and his professional demeanor in the unlikely location of the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City, where he works as Chief of the Medical Staff at the Veterans Administration Hospital. As a side practice, however, he becomes involved with the early history, diagnosis and attempts to treat Human Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV) and Acquired Immune Defficiency Syndrom (AIDS). As a result of Verghese's professional compulsion to undertand the science behind the treatments he prescribes, he continues to run afoul of his personal life and risks the alienation of his nuclear ethnic Indian family. "My Own Country" is clearly the story of a self made medical hero, told in his own words. Those who want their personal physicians to be holistic healers and more in touch with their humanity may disagree with Verghese's approach to his profession. Indeed, one wonders how much of the medical text was toned down to make the book appealing to the trade paperback market. Regardless of how medical the "doctor-doctor" in Verghese is, he is still human enough to be emotionally riveted by the birth of his children, at least for a little while. Perhaps the best thing about reading "My Own Country" is the professional manner presented for thrid world country physicians who are as dedicated (or more) to healing as any, but defensive about skin color in America. In other words, identifying good, even great, physicians, should be a color blind process. Besides making a positive social statement, even in the face of personal sacrifice, Verghese writes a good story. "My Own Country" is entertaining and there's a lesson to be learned for everyone in the reading.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating wonderful book
Review: I just read Dr. Verghese's two books. "My Own Country" was a fascinating, marvelously written book I couldn't put down and so was "The Tennis Partner." I only wish Dr. Verghese wasn't so busy as a medical director so that he had more time to write a third book. I will be waiting for it.
Rating:
Summary: A Must-Read for Those Interested in Medicine
Review: As a medical student who is beginning to explore what it means to be a physician, I am fortunate to have read Verghese's work. My Own Country depicts a very scary period of time in the world -- a horrible, fatal disease was spreading throughout the world, and there was little that even the scientists knew about it. The ignorance and paranoia that AIDS caused in the early- and mid-80's was evident in the smallest of towns, including the community in which Verghese practiced as an infectious disease specialist. Verghese describes his helplessness in treating a disease of which very little was known at the time. Since one of the hard facts regarding AIDS at the time was that it was inevitably fatal, Verghese knows he could do very little medically for his growing number of AIDS patients. He therefore agonizes over how do deal with these patients. For Verghese, this oftentimes means sitting down with the patient in order to gain an understanding of what the disease means to them, and how they came to contract the disease. As a medical student who plans to return to my small-town roots to practice, I was able to identify with Verghese as a doctor practicing in a small town. I highly recommend this book, particularly for those with an interest in medicine. Verghese's descriptive style of writing combined with his outlook on medicine makes this a very interesting and inspirational book.
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