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Published Apr 1995
448 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City saw its first AIDS patient in August 1985. Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases who became, by necessity, the local AIDS expert. Out of his experience comes a startling, ultimately uplifting portrait of the American heartland.
"Writing with an outsider's empathy and insight, casting his chronicle in graceful prose, he offers a memorable tale that both captures and transcends time and place." - Publishers Weekly.
"This novelistic account, occasionally overly detailed, provides a heartfelt perspective on the American response to the spread of AIDS." - Library Journal.
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Photo: Joanne Chan
Born in 1955 as the second of three sons of Indian parents recruited by Emperor Haile Selassie to teach in Ethiopia, Abraham Verghese grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there. When the emperor was deposed, Verghese briefly joined his parents who had moved to the United States because of the war. He worked in a hospital before returning to complete his medical education at Madras Medical College.
After graduation, he left India for a residency in the United States, and like many other foreign medical graduates, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in one of his early New Yorker articles, The Cowpath to America.
From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was a internal medicine resident from 1980 to 1983, he moved...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Abraham Verghese's Website
Name Pronunciation
Abraham Verghese: vur-gees with a hard 'g'
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