Cutting
for Stone by Abraham Verghese (2009)
Labels
for this book could be mixed nationality twins, India, Aden, Ethiopia,
Mission nuns, American surgeons, love, devotion, surgery, civil war,
teenage curiosity, skillful education. Emperor Haille
Selaisse, American medical schools, Addis Adiba, Eritrea, Boston
hospital medical school organ transplantation , etc etc. So many they would be difficult to list.
A
thick epic book by a first class writer and story teller. The tale
holds you tight as you follow the life of Marion , a mixed
Indian/American child who grows up on a different path to his twin
brother Shiva but both become great medical men and struggle with
finding and understanding their true father, Dr Thomas Stone a renown surgeon. ( that
should give a hint to the title).
Starting in Ethiopia the tale winds through life in a Mission school .The twins gain their knowledge of surgery and healing through following their
adoptive parents. The boys separate at adolescence into
different personality types. Follow that with a separatist war with Eritrea,
and the fleeing of Marion to America .Here he goes to a medical
school to learn to become a surgeon and becomes involved in the
research of organ transplants. It sounds a bit dull but it isn't . it
is so well told you want to know what happens to this young man and
whether he will ever find his father and find out why he and his twin were discarded at birth,
After
I had read this book I realized what a lot I didn't know about the
world and history and geography and things that have happened in the past hundred
years. That is the value of reading a well written novel . You learn
things without realizing that you are doing so because you become
engrossed in the story.
This
was an excellent book.
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