Category Archives: Book Review

Book Review, FamousDetective, Mystery, Novel

Before The Frost (2002)

Leave a comment

Kurt Wallander is a fictional police detective created by Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell. “Before The Frost” is the tenth Wallander book to be translated into English. You can read more in Wikipedia. Moreover, Kenneth Branagh has made 3 TV adaptations, one of which is shown regularly on public television.

“Before the Frost” is a bit different in that it features not only the aging Kurt Wallander but also his daughter Linda who is about to enter the police force as a young rookie. Religious fanaticism is the central theme (a flavor somewhat like “The DaVInci Code” but MUCH better written).

I’m hooked, so I will probably read the entire Wallander series.

1989, Book Review, Novella

Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989)

Leave a comment

In the NY Times I stumbled across a recommendation for older books for summer reading. Among the suggestions was a book by Jane Smiley containing two novellas. “Ordinary Love” was the first novella and it was OK. But what I am recommending is the second novella “Good Will”.

Weighing in at 101 pages, “Good Will” for me was a uniquely original story. Told in the first person by the father of the family of three, father and mother and son, we see a family that lives a counterculture life on a somewhat remote piece of land. Much of the narration gives us details about how this family survives without money. They do everything for themselves: raise farm animals, grow their own crops, and build their own buildings. But they stop short at home-schooling the boy Tom. He gets to take the bus although most of the time this auto-less family walks or skis to destinations such as town. Don’t be put off by the initial description of how the family accomplishes the day to day chores. You might think, “Oh, this is just too self-congratulating and dull.” Hang in there for some real surprises. Without giving anything away, the suspense centers around the son. How would your react if you were a shoolboy whose parents were so independently self-reliant ?

1978, Autobiographical, Book Review, Medical, Novel, Sexual Episodes

The House of God (1978)

Leave a comment

Direct quote from Alex Beam in the Boston Globe:

Give the doctor his due: The staying power of Stephen Bergman’s 1978 novel, “The House Of God,” is astonishing. (Begman published the book under the pseudonym Samuel Shem.) Largely ignored when it first came out, with its author shunned by his colleagues for telling tales out of medical school, “The House of God” has since sold more than 2 million copies. It appears on med-school syllabuses and has become a cult classic in the shadowy insider world of aspiring doctors.

“The House of God” is a book to which few are indifferent. A dark, satirical bildungsroman set in the hurly-burly of Beth Israel Hospital’s emergency room, where Bergman worked as an intern, it has been dismissed – by a doctor, or course – as “a piece of trash.” John Updike loved the book and in 1995 contributed a near-fulsome introduction, comparing it quite aptly to Joseph Heller’s classic “Catch-22”; Bergman’s work “glows with the celebratory essence of a real novel,” he wrote.

My son and I confessed to each other that we didn’t read much past the iconic sex scenes in the middle of the 400-page novel. That’s OK: Updike loved the gamy parts, too. “The sex is most conspicuous,” he wrote, “an in the orgies with Angel and Molly acquires an epic size and pornographic ideality.”

But the clean parts stay with you too. Who can forget ER epithets like “LOLNAD” (Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress) or “GOMER” (Get Out of My Emergency Room), taught to the impressionable young interns by the profane, countercultural resident, the Fat Man. Said Fat Man counsels his young charges that “the only good admission is a dead admission” (because they don’t have to be turfed out of the ER to another service) and to avoid touching patients at all costs. Why? Because they are sick!

In addition to lucrative sales, Bergman and his book have something else to boast about: newfound respectability. Writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, Anne Hudson Jones compared “The House of God” to Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.” Bergman contributed a long article about his book to an American College of Physicians Journal last year and guesses that he has addressed more than 50 medical school commencements in the United States and Europe in the past decade.

But none in Boston, where memories are long and fuses short.