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The Spirit of the Place
By Samuel Shem
Publisher: Kent State University Press Pub.
Date: June 15 2008
320pp
www.literaryventures.org
Book Room Review
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After traveling the world as a
Doctor With Borders, Orville Rose is just getting settled in Italy with his Buddhist girlfriend
Celestina. He receives a telegram informing
him his mother has died. After coming
back home to Columbia, Orville discovers his
mother left him one million dollars, but only on the condition he lives in Columbia for one year and
thirteen days. The last thing Orville
wants to do is stay but he decides he can’t resist the offer. He goes to work for his mentor, Dr. Bill, who
is still practicing in his seventies. But soon Bill takes off for vacation and
doesn’t return, leaving Orville to care for the working poor of Columbia that he secretly
hates. During his year of living in Columbia, Orville begins
to confront the ghosts of his past and his present ( He literally sees his dead
mother floating above him). Orville also
meets a single mother Miranda, and falls in love. But Orville still struggles with whether to
stay in a town he has been running away from his whole life.
I have to admit I struggled
with some aspects of this book. I
couldn’t understand Orville’s conflict with Columbia.
His anger at his patients seemed to come from nowhere. On the other hand, his relationship with
Miranda and her son kept me reading and rooting for them. Orville’s difficult relationship with his
mother was realistic and would make for a great discussion for book clubs. Samuel Shem’s writing is beautiful and full
of rich imagery. This is a book to savor and to discuss. I hope people will pick up this lovely book.
About the Author
Samuel Shem (pen-name of
Stephen Bergman, M.D., Ph.D.) is a novelist, playwright, and for three decades
a doctor on the Harvard
Medical School
faculty. His novels include: THE HOUSE OF GOD, which has sold over two million
copies in thirty languages, FINE, and MOUNT MISERY,
called "another medical classic." With his wife Janet Surrey he is
the author of the hit Off Broadway play BILL W. AND DR. BOB, the story of the
founding of Alcoholics Anonymous (winner of the 2007 Performing Arts Award of
the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence), the nonfiction book WE
HAVE TO TALK, HEALING DIALOGUES BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN (winner of the Paradigm
Shift Award of the Boston Interfaith Counseling Service), and the curriculum
MAKING CONNECTIONS: BUILDING GENDER DIALOGUE AND COMMUNITY IN SECONDARY SCHOOL.
A 30th anniversary symposium-"Return to the House of God: Medical
Education Revisited 1978-2008"-will be held at the Cleveland Clinic in
October 2008, also published by Kent State University Press. Shem has been
honored as one of Boston Public Library's "Literary Lights," as one
of "Boston's
Best Authors," and as a speaker at the Hemingway Centennial Celebration at
the JFK Library. He has received the Vanderbilt University Medal of Merit, has
given the commencement address at over fifty medical schools, has spoken all
over the world on "How to Stay Human in Medicine," and has published
a noted essay, "Fiction as Resistance."
Book Room Grade
B-
Review Posted: June 24, 2008
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