Book Review #65 - Cutting For Stone

I think the only way to motivate myself to write these book reviews that have piled up since May is to first write about the ones I liked best.

Cutting For Stone is definitely at the top of my summer "books I've read" list. Epic in nature like Steinbeck and Stegner, Verghese creates a truly memorable saga about forgiveness, family and death. While not the merriest subjects, Verghese treats them with such depth and variety that at the end of the hefty 560 pages, you have been treated to an uplifting story - the kind you can sigh about when finished.

Sister Mary Joseph Praise, while traveling with a fellow nun by ship on their way from India to an African mission where they are told they are needed most, becomes the ship's nurse after most of the passengers, including Dr. Thomas Stone, become ill with typhoid. While she successfully revives Stone, her companion does not survive, making Sister Praise's future uncertain. Both Stone and Praise leave an impression on each other as Sister Praise's trajectory eventually lands her next to Stone as his assistant at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It is the setting of Missing Hospital (really Mission Hospital, but it soon becomes its commonly mispronounced name) that allows the book's many wonderful characters to develop.

Foremost of all these characters is Marion, one of the twin brothers born from a secret love affair between Thomas Stone and Mary Joseph Praise. Praise dies during childbirth and Stone, tormented by his loss and confusion, disappears. Marion, and his brother, Shiva, are raised by two fellow physicians at Missing - Hema, an Indian OB/GYN and Ghosh, an internist turned surgeon after Stone flees (he's literally "cutting for Stone", which is just one, and probably the most obvious, of the title's many meanings) raise the boys as their own until one brother betrays the other and Marion leaves Africa for New York to be trained in America's very different world of medicine.

The story can be complicated, with heavy doses of medical jargon that make it seem less accessible than it actually is, but plowing through all of the surgical details, even the sometimes uncomfortable female anatomical references (there is a lot of OB/GYN talk so if the words vulva, labia or vagina make you squirm, this might not be the book for you) is worth it. Like all great epics, the middle section can be heavy and slow-going, but the development is necessary to make the end as great as it is.

Highly recommended.