|
The Montreal Gazette - February 13, 2010 - A good novel by a physician is a rare thing, perhaps because medicine is such a demanding mistress. Abraham Verghese is a ....
Click here for PDF
|
|
International Examiner - February 9, 2010 - A doctor/author creates 'characters who are larger than life yet painfully human.'
Click here for PDF
|
|
Book Page Review - February 5, 2010 - New Paperbacks for Reading Groups
Click here for PDF
|
|
New York Times - January 21, 2010. Sunday Book Review
Cutting for Stone listed on Elsa Dixler's Paperback Row
|
|
America - August 26, 2009
Rarely in recent memory has a novel so captivated me--even hooked me--as Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. I knew the book was getting to me when I began to violate my almost stereotypical routine for reading novels.
|
|
India Currents - July 24, 2009
Most readers of novels in the West are also consumers of modern medicine--a world of diagnosis and treatment enabled by pharmaceuticals, biotechnologies, insurers and medical professionals. Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone is about the human side of care giving...
|
|
The Nelson Mail - June 24, 2009
African-raised and Indian-trained doctor Abraham Verghese has subscribed to the fail-safe formula of writing a good story - write about what you know. Cutting for Stone traces the lives of conjoined twins Shiva and Marion Stone, abandoned at birth by the grim death of their mother...
|
|
JAMA - June 3, 2009
For physician-writers, 2009 is off to a terrific start. Two works of medical fiction are must-reads: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese and Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell. Verghese's novel is empathic, hopeful, selfless, and spiritual...
|
Tadias Magazine - June 2, 2009
I. The Hippocratic Oath The title of Abraham Verghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone, is intriguing, perhaps unrewardingly so. In the book's epilogue, Verghese, a surgeon and professor at Stanford Medical School, closes with the following explanation,...
|
Ethiopian Review - May 24, 2009
This unusual book tells the story of twin boys born to an Indian nun who works in a hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Their father is the hospital's surgeon, though he claims to have no knowledge of how the pregnancy happened. The twins are conjoined, and a...
|
Financial Times - May 11, 2009
In 1954 in Addis Ababa, an Indian nun, a nursing sister with a thing about Bernini, gives birth to identical twins who are attached at the head. This happens despite the best efforts of their father, the attending clinician, to crush their skulls in the birth...
|
Guardian - May 9, 2009
Abraham Verghese, an Indian, grew up in Addis Ababa, has lived in Madras and various cities in America, and thus, regardless of temperament, would always have felt something of a watchful outsider. This first novel was preceded by two non-fiction books: The...
|
Guelph Mercury - May 2, 2009
Warning: the book you are about to read about is 534 pages long. If that size intimidates you, read no further. But you'll be missing one of the best books I've read in the past three years. I didn't actually read Abraham Verghese's novel Cutting for Stone...
|
Tehelka Magazine - April 25, 2009
Though we spend a greater part of our lives working, few novels really examine work. In recent times, Joshua Ferris explored (with a poetic first person plural voice) the tender, comical insides of an ad agency in the throes of recession. In And Then We Came to the End...
|
London's Independent - April 3, 2009
In medicine, there are times when one can do nothing. The novelist can always do something. But in both cases, and seldom better exemplified than in Verghese's lovely book, there is a heart to be uncovered. Literature is the story of the winner: the person who...
|
Pittsburgh Tribune - March 22, 2009
For most laymen, medicine is a complex and opaque thing, a web of molecular biology, the workings of which are mystical, mysterious, unknowable. For Abraham Verghese, a physician who teaches at Stanford University, it's simpler. The bricks and mortar...
|
Indianapolis Star - March 22, 2009
A novel set in Africa bears a heavy burden. The author must bring it home, that continent, into the reader's more defined existence: To help the reader sit in a chair and imagine Africa; vast, ancient, sorrowful, beautiful Africa. Abraham Verghese's...
|
Sunday Times - March 19, 2009
The Hippocratic oath is often invoked by name, but few of us could quote a word from it. Most doctors are no exception because, contrary to popular belief, they don't have to take the oath before beginning to practise medicine. Abraham Verghese, who is a...
|
Boston Globe - March 19, 2009
Spanning three countries and 50 years, nonfiction writer and physician Abraham Verghese's debut novel has already been described as an epic. While I quibble with that definition, Cutting for Stone is certainly a long book, and a generally engrossing...
|
Canadian Med Assoc Journal Review - March 17, 2009
Abraham Verghese's novel, Cutting for Stone, recounts the story of Marion Praise Stone's journey from before his birth, at a mission hospital in Ethiopia, to his surgical practice in the United States. The book contains some very fine prose and among its...
|
Leaving India: My Family's Journey, by Minalhajatwala - March 13, 2009
"In the psychology of diaspora many pathologies have been defined: disorientation, alienation, difficulty in assimilating. ... Is the grief I have felt, sometimes, in this writing, a kind of transmitted nostalgia...
|
Baton Rouge Advocate - March 8, 2009
Clearly Verghese paid attention in English Lit 101. He begins this entrancing novel with an opening sentence that is so full of implication it's practically Dickensian. "After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother's womb, my brother, Shiva...
|
Educating Petunia - March 6, 2009
Though I finished reading it over the weekend it took me a few more days to ponder what I had experienced with Cutting for Stone. It was a marvelous book. Within the first 100 pages there is a nun giving birth to conjoined twins before she dies and an...
|
Minneapolis Star Tribune - March 6, 2009
It's easy to resent Abraham Verghese, author of the debut novel, Cutting for Stone, as an overachiever. He's a doctor as well as a writer, for starters. "Cutting for Stone" may be his first novel, but he's also the author of two well-received memoirs....
|
Los Angeles Times - March 4, 2009
A novel set in Africa bears a heavy burden. The author must bring it home, that continent, into the reader's more defined existence: To help the reader sit in a chair and imagine Africa; vast, ancient, sorrowful, beautiful Africa...
|
Lubbock Avalanche Journal - February 28, 2009
Listen to voices of wisdom, which contrary to our expectations, may live in the young as well as the old. It took a word from a wise 11-year-old to teach this Granny the value of perspective about household challenges. We were driving home from a Lady...
|
St. Louis Post-Dispatch - February 22, 2009
How to sum up Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone? Well, it's a coming-of-age novel. But it's also a novel about doctors and nurses living amid the rich contradictions of Ethiopia. Then again, it's a novel about the making of a surgeon, an expatriate who...
|
Chicago Tribune - February 21, 2009
The classical Hippocratic oath includes the avowal that "I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work." This, assumedly, is the allusion the physician and writer Abraham Verghese...
|
New Indian Express - February 19, 2009
Marion Stone, son of Sister Mary Joseph, an Indian nurse-nun and Thomas Stone, a British surgeon tells the story of his life for the sake of his conjoined twin brother Shiva. Born in Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa where his parents worked, Marion...
|
Seattle Times - February 19, 2009
If you're hungry for an epic that begins in 1940s Madras, sails through a typhoid outbreak, stumbles through a sordid khat den in Yemen, lingers in a plucky mission clinic in Addis Ababa and climaxes in a gritty New York City hospital before alighting, for a...
|
Jakarta Globe - February 17, 2009
Nearly two decades ago, when Abraham Verghese put his career as a physician on hold to try his hand at fiction, he knew he wanted to write an 'epic medical novel.' Beyond that, things were a little vague. Verghese, an internist specializing in infectious...
|
Cleveland Plain Dealer - February 15, 2009
At its best, the first novel from physician Abraham Verghese displays the virtues so evident in his best-selling and much-lauded memoirs: My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. Verghese has a knack for well-structured scenes, a passion for medicine and a gift...
|
Austin-American Statesman - February 15, 2009
"Why St. Teresa, mother?" the narrator of Abraham Verghese's masterful first novel asks longingly. Marion Praise Stone wants to understand his long-dead mother and her devotion to the 16th-century mystic. But the circumstances surrounding his birth complicate that...
|
India Today, Book Review - February 15, 2009
It is unlikely that you will come across such a sentence even in a novel that unravels man's innermost mysteries: "If the beating heart is pure theatre, a playful, moody, extroverted organ cavorting in the chest, then the liver, sitting under the diaphragm, is...
|
Newsday, Book Review - February 15, 2009
'Call me unwanted, call my birth a disaster, call me the bastard child of a disgraced nun and a disappeared father, call me a cold-blooded killer who lies to the brother of the man I killed." By the time Dr. Marion Praise Stone, the narrator of Cutting for Stone,...
|
Dallas Morning News - February 15, 2009
After two highly successful nonfiction books, Abraham Verghese has written an enthralling debut novel set largely in Ethiopia, the country where he grew up. Verghese creates a saga grand enough for the movies, yet sensitive in its explorations of character, purpose....
|
Fort Worth Star Telegram - February 15, 2009
Abraham Verghese, who lived for several years in El Paso and San Antonio before moving to California, made a big splash with the nonfiction My Own Country (a chronicle of his time as a doctor in Tennessee during the '80s AIDS crisis) and The Tennis Partner...
|
Fredericksburg Free Lance Star - February 15, 2009
I picked up a copy of his nonfiction work, The Tennis Partner, out of pure curiosity. I wasn't expecting to be captivated by its intimate prose or the compelling story about addiction and enduring friendship. Instead of merely coming away with a topic of conversation...
|
Oregonian - February 14, 2009
In Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese's ambitious first novel, a surgeon experiences what he calls ecstasy. After several years in New York, Dr. Marion Stone is returning to Addis Ababa accompanied by the obstetrician who delivered and raised him and his twin...
|
The Economist - February 12, 2009
SURGERY is a wonderful metaphor. Flexible and sharp, it can incise, expose, exenterate and heal. Abraham Verghese?s first two books, My Own Country (1994) and The Tennis Partner (1999), were intelligent, sensitive examinations of health and disease, communication...
|
Entertainment Weekly, Book Review - February 11, 2009
Any doubts you might (reasonably) harbor about a 534-page first novel by a physician in his 50s will be allayed in the first few pages of this marvelous book. Abraham Verghese has written two graceful memoirs, the first about his experiences with AIDS patients...
|
Winnipeg Free Press - February 10, 2009
Epics often rely on larger-than-life characters, or sweeping historical settings, for much of their force. An epic about regular, or even marginalized people, away from the grand canvas of important events, requires the skill and subtlety of a surgeon. Or at...
|
Psychology Today - February 9, 2009
It's hard when a good friend doesn't get his due. Abraham Verghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone, is out, and the prominent reviews have been grudging. The New York Times complains about too much medical complexity and a baggy plot. That review isn't unperceptive...
|
New York Times, Sunday Book Review - February 8, 2009
Those words provide an epigraph partway through Abraham Verghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone, and also explain the surname of its narrator, Marion Stone, along with his twin brother, Shiva, and their father, the almost entirely absent surgeon Thomas Stone...
|
San Antonio Express-News - February 8, 2009
To understand Abraham Verghese, writer, you must contemplate Abraham Verghese, physician. The two are joined at the heart, and there isn't a surgeon skillful enough to separate them. "My writing emanates from a very personal stance, which in my case is wrapped...
|
Miami Herald - February 7, 2009
''Why St. Teresa, mother?'' the narrator of Abraham Verghese's masterful first novel asks longingly. Marion Praise Stone wants to understand his long-dead mother and her devotion to the 16th century mystic. But the circumstances surrounding his birth complicate...
|
New Jersey Star Ledger - February 6, 2009
In 1994, an Ethiopian-born doctor named Abraham Verghese published a breathtakingly beautiful memoir called My Own Country, about dealing with the AIDS epidemic in a small Tennessee town. A second memoir titled The Tennis Partner followed, establishing...
|
Barnes & Noble - February 4, 2009
Abraham Verghese's My Own Country, an incandescent memoir of the author's early years as a doctor caring for HIV patients in rural Tennessee, was one of those books that seemed to make an indelible impression on everyone who read it. His next work, The Tennis...
|
The Washington Post - February 1, 2009
'"Why St. Teresa, mother?" the narrator of Abraham Verghese's masterful first novel asks longingly. Marion Praise Stone wants to understand his long-dead mother and her devotion to the 16th-century mystic. But the circumstances surrounding his birth complicate...
|
San Francisco Chronicle - February 1, 2009
An epic tale about love, abandonment, betrayal and redemption, Abraham Verghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone, is a masterpiece of traditional storytelling. Not a word is wasted in this larger-than-life tome, a saga that spans three countries and six decades...
|
Texas Monthly - February 2009
In a sense, Marion Stone, the narrator of Abraham Verghese's sparkling first novel, Cutting for Stone, is a dramatically enhanced doppelgänger of his creator. Like Verghese, he is born in Ethiopia to Indian parents, becomes a physician, and relocates to America...
|
Houston Chronicle - January 31, 2009
Abraham Verghese is a physician whose nonfiction books The Tennis Partner and My Own Country received rave reviews. Now appears his much-anticipated first novel, Cutting for Stone. Set primarily in an Ethiopian hospital called Missing (a misprint of 'mission')...
|
SA Express-News, S Bennett - January 18, 2009
Three years ago, Dr. Abraham Verghese gave a reading from his long-awaited first-novel-in-progress at the St. Anthony Hotel that had men in the audience squirming in their seats and women laughing nervously. Honored with Gemini Ink's annual literary...
|
PW Review - October 27, 2008
Lauded for his sensitive memoir (My Own Country) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the '80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel...
|
