Recorded Books Inc. - My own country: a doctors story of a town and its people in the age of aids

Acclaim for

Abraham Vergheses

My Own Country

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR.

Time

My Own Country is a medical journey into the heart of a community. Walker Percy once called a character an old-fashioned physician of the soul. Dr. Verghese could claim this title as his own. This is a startling and disturbing book, yet as fine and lyrical as anything Ive read in a great while.

Kaye Gibbons,

author of Charms for the Easy Life and Ellen Foster

Engrossing... an empathetic and eloquently written memoir.

New York Newsday

My Own Country is a book about the effect of the AIDS epidemic in a deeply traditional, non-urban, country setting. But its also about identity... and reminds the reader of what is honorable and charitable in the way humans behave toward each other.

Washington Post Book World

Here is that special combination, a worthy subject and a doctor who can write. Vergheses depiction of AIDS in the Bible Belt brings to mind not medical writers but the masters of regional fiction: Bobbie Ann Mason, Reynolds Price, Flannery OConnor.

Peter D. Kramer,

author of Listening to Prozac

Haunting.... A story about AIDS that is intelligent, illuminating and, above all, deeply humane.

Dallas Morning News

Riveting.... My Own Country is devastating, inspiring, beautifully written.

Detroit Free Press

A heartbreaking chronicle of medical and human catastrophe in a microcosm. But My Own Country is also an unsentimental and careful meditation on the tenacious craving for a home in the world.

Entertainment Weekly

A remarkable testament... Verghese writes with the novelists exacting eye [and] an irresistible narrative drive.... An astonishing feat.

Gail Godwin, author of A Southern Family

A rich, literary work of medical anthropology.

Chicago Tribune

[A] story told from the closely observed heart of an epidemic. Far from being a sociological discourse, it is intensely personal; Dr. Vergheses vulnerability and his lucid prose give this book the emotional momentum of a good novel.... This impressive literary debut puts him in the esteemed company of such physician-writers as Sherwin Nuland and Richard Selzer.

John Irving, Vanity Fair

Abraham Verghese has an impeccable knowledge of his medicine but he also writes lucid, beautiful English prose in the tradition of Conrad and Nabokov. This warm wanderer, in search of home, bares his own soul until the reader is shaken, challenged, repentant, exultant and finally at peace.

Ferrol Sams, M.D.,

author of When All the World Was Young

Riveting.... A wrenching, gracefully written memoir.

People

Remarkable.... Vergheses intimate and unsentimental portraits of his patients and their friendsgay, straight and in-betweenopen up an unexamined American territory. Even more stunning is the grace and honesty with which he examines his own search for a sense of place in the world. My Own Country is vital reading.

Frank Browning,

author of The Culture of Desire

Stunningly truthful and brilliantly written. This is an amazing story of gripping human drama. Heres a physicians story that could help heal the soul of America, if only we would listen.

Mary Fisher,

author of Sleep with the Angels

(Founder of the Family AIDS Network)

This unexpected and often riveting book is one of the best accounts yet of how AIDS has transformed the American landscape. It opens our eyes.

Neil Miller,

author of Out in the World

A groundbreaking and heartbreaking account.

U.S. News & World Report

Absorbing.... Verghese is the rare combination of a doctor with a love of medicine and a love of people. In fact, Vergheses memoir has more the feel of a novel.... [He] writes unabashedly and compassionately about his unfolding awareness of gay life, an outsider forced to confront and change his preconceptions.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Well-written, fascinating... poignant. The AIDS community desperately requires more committed physicians like Dr. Verghese.

The Raleigh News & Observer

About the Author

Abraham Verghese is Professor and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has served on the faculty at East Tennessee State University, the University of Iowa, Texas Tech University, and the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, where he was the founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics and where he holds an adjunct professorship. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he is the author of The Tennis Partner , a New York Times Notable Book, and the bestselling novel Cutting for Stone. His essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker , The New York Times , Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic Monthly , Esquire, Story , Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere, and he is a regular correspondent for TheAtlantic.com. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

www.abrahamverghese.com

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Copyright 1994 by Abraham Verghese

Originally published in 1994 by Vintage

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First Scribner ebook edition November 2016

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ISBN 978-1-4767-6046-9 (ebook)

For Steven and Jacob

THE LONG VOYAGE

Not that the pines were darker there ,

nor mid-May dogwood brighter there ,

nor swifts more swift in summer air;

it was my own country ,

having its thunderclap of spring,

its long midsummer ripening ,

its corn hoar-stiff at harvesting ,

almost like any country ,

yet being mine; its face , its speech ,

its hills bent low within my reach ,

its river birch and upland beech

were mine, of my own country.

Now the dark waters at the bow

fold back, like earth against the plow;

foam brightens like the dogwood now

at home, in my own country.

From Blue Juniata: A Life by Malcolm Cowley

S UMMER, 1985. A young man is driving down from New York to visit his parents in Johnson City, Tennessee.

I can hear the radio playing. I can picture his parents waiting, his mother cooking his favorite food, his father pacing. I see the young man in my mind, despite the years that have passed; I can see him driving home along a route that he knows well and that I have traveled many times. He started before dawn. By the time it gets hot, he has reached Pennsylvania. Three hundred or so miles from home, he begins to feel his chest tighten.

He rolls up the windows. Soon, chills shake his body. He turns the heater on full blast; it is hard for him to keep his foot on the accelerator or his hands on the wheel.

By the time he reaches Virginia, the chills give way to a profuse sweat. Now he is burning up and he turns on the air conditioner, but the perspiration still soaks through his shirt and drips off his brow. His lungs feel heavy as if laden with buckshot. His breath is labored, weighted by fear and perhaps by the knowledge of the burden he is bringing to his parents. Maybe he thinks about taking the next exit off Interstate 81 and seeking help. But he knows that no one can help him, and the dread of finding himself sick and alone keeps him going. That and the desire for home.