The Tennis Partner Pdf Summary
An unforgettable, illuminating story of how men live and how they survive, from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone.
When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. There he meets David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction, and the two men begin a tennis ritual that allows them to shed their inhibitions and find security in the sport they love and with each other. This friendship between doctor and intern grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow. Just when it seems nothing can go wrong, the dark beast from David’s past emerges once again—and almost everything Verghese has come to trust and believe in is threatened as David spirals out of control.
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The Tennis Partner Review
TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE
5.0 out of 5 stars Friendship and addiction…
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2017
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I’ve read both of Abraham Verghese’s other works: Cutting for Stone and My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story . I’ve given both my special “6-star” rating for superlative works. Could he do it a third time, and in an area that is my adopted home, the deserts of the American Southwest? I decided not to ponder the question long, for there was an additional special pull: the compelling weekly tennis game.
Verghese provides loving descriptions of the diverse places he has inhabited on this good earth, from the eucalyptus trees perfuming the high African city of Addis Abba, to the lush green wooded hills and dales of eastern Tennessee that he has declared to be his home, but one that he would depart for professional reasons, to settle for a piece in El Paso, Texas, and find a lovely tennis court, high on a hill, just north of the city, where he could look across the Rio Grande at night, and observe the twinkling lights of one of the most violent cities on earth, Juarez, Mexico.
Verghese is a medical doctor, and his novels so accurately depict the medical field, to those who have partaken. He is a “lowly” internist, as he would wryly note in “My Own Country,” at least in terms of financial remuneration. Like Chekhov, and a few others, the internists are the observers, always noting skin hues, abnormalities, a slight puffiness here and there, even in their friends, socially. The good ones can also observe the heart and soul. In Verghese’s own words: “My Luddite streak was aroused. Would that I could wave a wand and bring back a simple pedal bike, bring back wooden rackets, bring back doctors who didn’t need batteries of blood test to diagnose conditions that were staring them in the face, bring back…”
No need for a “spoiler alert.” The “medical outcome” is in the dedication: “In memory of David Smith, M.D, 1959-1994.” Verghese and Smith balance their strengths and weaknesses. Verghese is now an accomplished doctor, based on his work in east Tennessee. Smith is the resident, still learning. Smith is also a very good tennis player, once out there on some loop of the semi-professionals. Verghese is aspiring, still learning. Smith accepts him on the Court, and Verghese accepts him on the medical rounds. Smith is Australian, and on a bit of a different career trajectory. And he has a “secret” that much of the hospital knows, and Verghese is late to discover: a history of opioid drug addiction. But all that is now safely in the past… or is it? As is well-known, on a percentage basis, those who work in the medical field are more likely to abuse drugs for two straightforward reasons: ease of access, and the pressure of always having to “get it right,” or, as the expression has it, you bury your mistakes. And it is the Emergency Room that is the worse place to work. Hum.
This work touched me personally more than the other two. I once worked in a vast open-air Emergency Room for a year. A fellow medic was addicted to the morphine we carried, and would shoot up all of his, and anyone else’s he could grab. And if a soldier was wounded, he would use Thorazine instead. A shudder from those who know the real implications of that. And what do you do about it? What is fair and reasonable for him, as well as the men in his unit? Turning him in, and he gets a one-way ticket to LBJ (Long Binh Jail), and the unit has no medic. Is an addicted medic better than none at all? It was a difficult call I did not have to make. But when Verghese wrote of his own rationalizations, the cover-ups, the “just one more chance…” I was right along, on edge the whole way.
Far more pleasantly, there were my own tennis games, with a medical doctor, who was NOT an addict. Neither of us were anywhere near the tennis league of Smith, nor even Verghese. But it was a lot of fun. The ritual, the passion, the wonderful exhaustion experienced thereafter, when two players are so evenly matched in their ineptitude. Every Tuesday night, a weekly highlight. Certainly it would be uncharitable to bring up my partner’s dyslexic line calls…
And then there is the matter of my son’s long-term girlfriend, now finishing her third year of med school. We talk books over dinners, and this is the one she really wants to read. Bravo. But I really think it should be in the “core curriculum” of any medical school.
As a final point, Verghese would do the same as he did in east Tennessee; he’d visit his patients outside the hospital setting, and in this case, it meant walking along the Rio Grande, looking in the bushes, for his partner who once was on the other side of the net. Empathy, and more than a bit of courage. I complete the three works with another 6-star determination, and realize that Abraham Verghese is the only author I have read who has received that determination for every work. May there be a fourth.
About Abraham Verghese Author Of The Tennis Partner pdf Book
Abraham Verghese MD, MACP, Author Of The Tennis Partner pdf Book, is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.
Born of Indian parents who were teachers in Ethiopia, he grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there. When Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed, he completed his training at Madras Medical College and went to the United States for his residency as one of many foreign medical graduates. Like many others, 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 resident from 1980 to 1983, he did his fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, working at Boston City Hospital for two years. It was here that he first saw the early signs of the HIV epidemic and later, when he returned to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine, he saw the second epidemic, rural AIDS, and his life took the turn for which he is most well known ? his caring for numerous AIDS patients in an era when little could be done and helping them through their early and painful deaths was often the most a physician could do.
His work with terminal patients and the insights he gained from the deep relationships he formed and the suffering he saw were intensely transformative; they became the basis for his first book, My Own Country : A Doctor’s Story, written later during his years in El Paso, Texas. Such was his interest in writing that he decided to take some time away from medicine to study at the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1991. Since then, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Forbes.com, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Following Iowa, he became professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years. In addition to writing his first book, which was one of five chosen as Best Book of the Year by Time magazine and later made into a Mira Nair movie, he also wrote a second best-selling book, The Tennis Partner : A Story of Friendship and Loss, about his friend and tennis partner?s struggle with addiction. This was a New York Times’ Notable Book
The Tennis Partner pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Later Printing edition (September 22, 1999)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 345 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060931132
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060931131
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.79 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,390,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #440 in Southern U.S. Biographies
- #2,646 in Medical Professional Biographies
- Customer Reviews: 4.3 out of 5 stars 430 ratings
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