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terrimarshall's review
5.0
This is an excellent memoir by an infectious disease physician about his experience working in a Tennessee community in the mid to late 1980s when the AIDS crisis was coming to a head. I love Dr. Verghese's style of writing, and I found his "political incorrectness" to be so refreshing in his observations. He is not American, so you can't accuse him of having our American racism or prejudices. He just describes it as he sees it. I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and will read his other memoir next. I read his one work of fiction a couple of years ago and loved it as well.
red_magpie's review
5.0
This book pretty much fits the bill for my absolute favorite type of reading: passionate people writing beautifully about whatever they care most about and the way in which they are transformed by that caring. Also I love a good medical memoir so I hit the jackpot with this one.
I looked for this book after reading Verghese's Cutting for Stone recently. That novel was brilliant and, as I didn't want it to end, I went looking for more of Verghese's writing. It would be hard for me to say which book I enjoyed more. The novel was lovely and engaging, but the real life memoir was no less so.
There are so many themes in this book that it's hard to pin them all down but Verghese's exploration of what it means to belong to a place is perhaps the most poignant.
The book is filled with well drawn portraits of individuals struck by the first wave of HIV/AIDS and we get a sense of how both a doctor and a community are transformed.
I looked for this book after reading Verghese's Cutting for Stone recently. That novel was brilliant and, as I didn't want it to end, I went looking for more of Verghese's writing. It would be hard for me to say which book I enjoyed more. The novel was lovely and engaging, but the real life memoir was no less so.
There are so many themes in this book that it's hard to pin them all down but Verghese's exploration of what it means to belong to a place is perhaps the most poignant.
The book is filled with well drawn portraits of individuals struck by the first wave of HIV/AIDS and we get a sense of how both a doctor and a community are transformed.
alciewms's review
5.0
It took me by surprise that I liked this book as much as I did. I'm uncomfortable with all things medical, and this book certainly contained quite a lot of that sort of content. But this story is so beautifully woven, and needs so much to be told, that I felt like I needed to breathe through the difficult parts so that I could take in the stories of these people who should never be forgotten.
alyssajensen11's review
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
internationalkris's review
3.0
I read one third of this book and I have found it to be very insightful and interesting but I am stopping there. Though the book is intriguing and the author really opens up about his evolving acceptance of homosexuality, the dated view of sexual identity kept jabbing at me. I do appreciate the Verghese is writing from a very normative societal view of the mid-80s and appreciate this window into the times, but I am not feeling open to a whole book of it. Still, good stuff is here, very honest writing about the emerging AIDS crisis in America including lots of medical details about treatment. The setting of the book in the rural south is also fascinating though as I read it I imagined everyone wearing a red ballcap. So the did-not-finish label is really all about me and not about this book.
leavingsealevel's review
3.0
This was an interesting read. Verghese recently wrote a successful novel, [b:Cutting for Stone|3591262|Cutting for Stone|Abraham Verghese|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255630895s/3591262.jpg|3633533], which means that this book, which was actually published in 1994, got some renewed attention as well. My Own Country is Verghese's story of his work as a straight small-town doctor during the AIDS epidemic. As such, it's also a story about solidarity with the Queer community in a place and a time when that was not a given...more with the solidarity/ally stuff, I know. You ever feel like a theme follows you around?
I thought the stance Verghese chose to take is inspiring and heartening, though I noticed a couple other Goodreads reviews that point out that he does spend a decent amount of the book talking about how it was hard for him to take that stance...not just how it was hard internally for him to examine and get past his prejudices, but also how he got shit from people for it. Totally valid things for allies to talk about...if I were to sit down and write a thing about anti-racism or international solidarity ally stuff, definitely things I would think about, and the former is a useful thing to examine publically. The latter though...I think by writing too much about how hard it is to be an ally or how much we risk as allies, we run into a dangerous chance of obscuring the point. In solidarity work, the struggles that privileged (in whatever way) solidarity activists/allies face are real, but they are SO not the point. I didn't feel like this ruined My Own Country by any means, but it was a little excessive.
I barely even really *remember* the 1980s, so reading this was educational. I should loan it to an actual grown-up, and see what they think...
I thought the stance Verghese chose to take is inspiring and heartening, though I noticed a couple other Goodreads reviews that point out that he does spend a decent amount of the book talking about how it was hard for him to take that stance...not just how it was hard internally for him to examine and get past his prejudices, but also how he got shit from people for it. Totally valid things for allies to talk about...if I were to sit down and write a thing about anti-racism or international solidarity ally stuff, definitely things I would think about, and the former is a useful thing to examine publically. The latter though...I think by writing too much about how hard it is to be an ally or how much we risk as allies, we run into a dangerous chance of obscuring the point. In solidarity work, the struggles that privileged (in whatever way) solidarity activists/allies face are real, but they are SO not the point. I didn't feel like this ruined My Own Country by any means, but it was a little excessive.
I barely even really *remember* the 1980s, so reading this was educational. I should loan it to an actual grown-up, and see what they think...