My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of Aids
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Product Description
The first book by a doctor who works with AIDS victims daily offers a revealing look at the impact of AIDS on a tiny Tennessee town, as townspeople respond to the disease’s presence in inspiring ways.
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What a lousy book! Verghese seems far more enamored with himself and his pen than the people he is supposed to treat. Yeccchh!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Not only does this book provide a limited look at Aids in a tiny community, but gives us an thought 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 ancient ways. Our mountains provide isolation from new thoughts and changes to our regional dialect. But we all are not so ignorant as he would have you judge. Johnson City has a university and a medical school. I loved 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.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
This based-on the leader’s right-tale details the time he was just starting out as a doctor. He selected a Hospital in smalltown United States where he would be the communicable disease specialist. Suddenly, cases of AIDS appeared even in that tiny town. It was the 80’s epidemic and as it spread from the huge cities AIDS victims were met with dread and a lack of compassion from most doctors. Verghese was one of the few who truly listened to and cared for his patients through such a terrible disease.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Having loved some of Verghese’s essays, I looked forwards 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 tales of his patients. So regularly 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 tales of the AIDS patients, and I’m left wishing that Verghese had made this book more of a “patients’ tale” than a “doctor’s tale.”
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Abraham Verghese may occasionally turn a excellent axiom, but the book rarely gets deeper than that. It plods along the winding and convoluted path of his experiences treating AIDS patients in rural Tennessee.
His tales are occasionally appealing and enlightening, most particularly when they focus on the patients, their families, and how they deal with this devastating disease.
Sorry to say, the leader suffers from self-centered myopia. He spends far too much time discussing himself–a theme he clearly finds fascinating. Even with all meandering introspection, he never manages to question his own convictions. He manages to question the integrity of the local culture, America, and even his ailing patients, but he never examines his own attitudes with the same scrutiny and condescension he applies to others’.
In the end, the book had a few redeeming qualities, but they were squelched by the leader’s annoying know-it-all tone. His long-winded focus on self detracted from what could have been a powerful collection of tales.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5