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Summary: Alarming Mystery of the Beginning of the AIDS crisis.
Review: I could not put this book down. It is well written and tells the heartbreak of AIDS and the difficulty of treating without knowledge at the beginning of the Crisis. This book led me to read and learn everything I can about doctoring, healing and AIDS. Eye opening and well written. Human beings are awesome in overcoming obstacles.
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Summary: Amazed
Review: Being a native of a town very similar in size and demographics to Johnson City, and only about an hours drive away, I am stunned by the reaction from the reader from there. I see no condensation on the part of Dr. Verghese and to me the community of Johnson City comes across in a tremendously flattering light. I know have heard many people from other parts of the United States talk about how this book helped to shatter stereotypes they had of the southern Appalachians. The reader, who apparently did not read the book carefully (the University, medical school, and VA center were in the book) would do well to rail against images like "Deliverance" which have done far more to damage to those of us from the region than a remarakably affirming book like has, or ever will.
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Summary: ksahlin's review is prejudiced
Review: ksahlin's Aug 17 review of this book talks about the prejudice of the "foreign doctor" in the way he depicts Johnson City, and then concludes his review by saying "go back to India."This is the story of the first AIDS cases in a small, isolated city in Tennessee, and describes the anger and fear felt by the residents of Johnson City - the same anger and fear felt by the rest of the country when AIDS first became an issue. If you're offended by an Indian talking about the early ignorance of Tennesseeans towards AIDS, then you really shouldn't be reading books like this.
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Summary: I couldn't put this book down
Review: This book was amazing. Verghese takes the reader through a poweful, eye-opening, informative storyline of the people who are forced to confront the AIDS virus in his rural town in Tennessee. The book gives an excellent history of the disease, including the panic people felt about it when it first started to really hit the public around 1984 and 1985. The account of an elderly couple who became infected because of a blood transfusion is particularly powerful.
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Summary: Beautifully written and fascinating.
Review: Abraham Verghese is first and foremost a wonderful writer. His prose is poetric; his sentences carefully crafted. His voice flows in a powerfully intimate river of words. READ THIS BOOK! You will learn about AIDs, you will learn about East Tennessee, and you'll learn about Dr. Verghese. He is an introspective, precious human being who wishes more than anything to make everyone happy and whole. I am also from Johnson City and only wish that I had run into Abe sometime down at QBs or Poor Richards. Maybe he'd read my writing...
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Summary: An easy read into the mind of an outsider.
Review: Not only does this book provide a limited look at Aids in a small community, but gives us an idea of the mind of a foreign doctor's prejudice towards what he sees as a backwards area of the USA. I am a native of Johnson City, TN, the location of his medical practice described in this book. I was raised here, left in 1979 and traveled extensively till returning in 1995. I too view my home town with a certain amount of detachment and objectiveness, which leads to a bit of embarrassment and distain. Yes, the rural parts of this mountainous area are full of the old ways. Our mountains provide isolation from new ideas and changes to our regional dialect. But we all are not so ignorant as he would have you believe. Johnson City has a university and a medical school. I enjoyed reading about my home town, the locations and streets of which I am familiar, BUT the attitude of superority in the doctors narrative is beyond condensending and is more insulting to the members of this city of over fifty thousand. The editors must have deleted part of his origonal title " My Own Country is Better Than Yours". Doctor, go back to India and tell us how the "have nots" live there, and Please limit your insults to YOUR own country.
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Summary: A disappointing exercise in egocentrism.
Review: Having enjoyed some of Verghese's essays, I looked forward to My Own Country. But I was disappointed by the clumsy writing and the lack of cohesiveness. And I was irritated by his persistent focus on his own feelings while faced with the tragic stories of his patients. So often in the book, he relates some terrible anecdote and then goes on to say how it reminds him of his own situation--which, of course, is utterly absurd. The value of the book lies in the stories of the AIDS patients, and I'm left wishing that Verghese had made this book more of a "patients' story" than a "doctor's story."
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Summary: A gem of a book! Honest, heart-warming, elegantly written.
Review: This is one of the best books I've read from a contemporary author. Verghese writes elegantly and with searing honesty about the AIDS patients he encountered as a young immigrant in small town America. So much has been written about his wonderful writing style and his compassion and humanity as a doctor...and I agree with all of that. I was especially interested in how he describes the gay experience as being analagous to the foreign immigrant experience in America. Both groups gain sustenance from their communities; both groups long for acceptance from the mainstream. It's interesting that the author's desire for assimilation is greater than his need to identify with the local Indian community. This book succeeds on every level. You gain insights into the life of the gay community, Indian immigrants, the medical community, and most of all the emotional and mental state of the man who describes it all. Thank you Doctor Verghese for this great book!
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Summary: The author teaches about living by sharing about dying.
Review: Abe Verghese is a warm fellow and he writes with a sense of mission and responsibility, eager to share with people the will to a meaningful life. Maybe it's those who are faced with death that can tell us how to really live, how to overlook those things that don't matter too much. Abe has found his niche. His compassion is real and he writes in a way to preserve the dignity of the person, lifting up the ordinary as something extraordinary in today's UNoridinary world. I know these things about Abe to be true because he tells the story about my own family in the book. My parents were Will and Bess Johnson, and by telling our story, he's been able to share with a lot of other people the important lessons my parents taught me and my brothers about dying, but more importantly about living. Will, Jr.
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Summary: Needs to be read by everyone
Review: Having lost a son to AIDS and living in the South, I wondered about other cases and how the other patients had died. This book puts faces on AIDS cases and makes me better understand what I went through. My son died in a big city and his suffering was probably less than the ones who had to come home to die. An excellent book that should be read by everyone.
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