Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

This was one of the books that I learned about at the end of 2009 when I was being email-bombed by Amazon with the series of “best” books. Best mysteries of 2009, best autobiographies, best nonfiction, best etc. I had forgotten which of those categories this one came from and, as I got into it, I assumed it was one of the best nonfiction works, so I was surprised when I actually read the book jacket at the end and found out that it was a work of fiction. This is a story of some people who migrate from India to Ethiopia and work as doctors and nurses in a poor public hospital, Missing (Mission) Hospital, in Addis Ababa. They work in partnership with some locals. One of the Ethiopians is a scrub nurse who has come from a convent in India, choosing to work in Addis rather than Aden for the love of a surgeon, Thomas Stone, who she met on the way to Aden. The two of them are a great team in the operating room, but their building love for one another goes unrealized, or so the reader is led to believe until, after seven years of working together when Sister Mary Joseph Praise unexpectedly delivers identical twin boys. This saintly woman had hid the pregnancy beneath her habit, and then she died in childbirth. Stone flees Addis to return to his native U.S. where he continues his brilliant career as a surgeon. The care of the boys, Marion and Shiva Stone, is left to two other doctors at the hospital, a man and a woman who eventually fall in love with one another. The story is about the development of the boys in the realm of the Emperor Haile Selassie. Then, Selassie is overthrown and the lives of everyone changes. One of the boys becomes a doctor, following in the steps of his father, and he eventually ends up in the U.S. where he encounters Stone for the first time. Their lives get further enmeshed, but to tell you that would ruin the story. This is a different read, but it is great fiction.

West Coast Don