A review by margaret_adams
My Own Country: A Doctor's Story by Abraham Verghese

Read for a book group of fellow medical providers. Verghese's account of working as a foreign doctor treating HIV/AIDS in rural Tennessee is a classic, but I couldn't help but feel that he had written it too soon after leaving Tennessee--it's so clear that he's still too "in" it to have a clarity of perspective. There is a myopic focus on his own feelings and experience with very little insight into those of the rest of the medical community, except to touch on his occasional feelings of superiority and/or alienation. Conversely, some of his interviews with patients stretch too long, though even then, you get the sense that the takeaway is that they have let him into their lives. It's fine to focus this on the author's life and experience, but the lack of resolution on that front at the end of the book is palpable.