Review
Bazell's profanely hilarious debut hits the ground running with a street thug
trying to mug New York City physician intern Peter Brown. The young doc is on
his way to work and doesn't have time for this nonsense so Brown (in some quick
not-learned-in-med-school moves) disables the jerk, throws him over his
shoulder, then drops him in the hospital's emergency room to care for his
injuries. What he did learn in med school was how to describe in graphic detail
just exactly how he is disabling the jerk – complete with footnotes. Four pages
in and I already know that Peter Brown is a really complex person. A benevolent
beast?
Many authors – and almost all first time novelists – build a character
slowly, page-by-deliberate-page. Don't get me wrong. Brown is much more than is
revealed in that first scene. His back story and current situation only...
Beyond the Book
The United Partisan Organization
In
Beat the Reaper the fictional Peter Brown/Pietro Brnwa recounts the story of how
his grandparents met in the winter of 1943 when they joined the Jewish
resistance movement in Poland, hiding out in the Bialowieza Forest. According to
Brnwa family legend the young couple (they were both fifteen at the time) were
duped into going back to Krakow in order to save her brother from the Nazis. It
was a ruse and they were sold into Auschwitz. They survived because both were
sent to work in the manufacturing part of the famed death camp. In one of the
more poignant passages of the book Brown tells about when, as an adult, he made
a trip to Poland to seek out the man who had betrayed his grandparents and,
while there, he...
