Title: My Own Country: A Doctor's Story
Author: Abraham Verghese
Year: 1994/1995
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 448
Verghese's very interesting memoir (though still somewhat longer than I think is called for) of his time as an infectious disease specialist in rural Tennessee during the early years of the AIDS crisis. Verghese does a great job of expressing his own fear, curiosity about, and movement toward understanding HIV and the people who are infected with it. His status as an accepted outsider in this community serves as a contrast to the unaccepted outsider status of his HIV+ patients, and his status is in turn made more precarious by his work with them.
I remember this era very well, including its unpredictable moments of both kindness and hostility, of risks taken in the name of humanness and fear unexpectedly enacted in hatred, sunning, and violence. Verghese really brings it all back.
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