Word: doctor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...belief. Their spirited exchange, waged before an enthralled and partisan audience of locals, is declared a draw. But the combatants have persuaded each other to switch positions. The minister resigns his post and faith, moves east and becomes a suave, voice-over pitchman in dog food TV commercials; the doctor takes up tub-thumping evangelical crusading. Late in the novel, a rematch is arranged. Once again, the debaters each wind up convinced that the other is right, but this time they embrace on the middle ground of skeptical belief. Tony gladly joins them: "My new mystique is the more constructive...
Holmberg sent for his old college biology book (he had received a gentleman's C in the course) and pored over it at night. By the time he returned to the U.S. in 1973, he had decided to become a doctor. In a year of dedicated slogging, he took the necessary preliminary courses and then graduated from Columbia University's medical school. He was determined to join the CDC, much to the amusement and disdain of more success-oriented classmates. "I was called a Goody Two-Shoes," he remembers...
That can be pretty far. A month after joining the CDC, Holmberg was on the Pacific island of Truk fighting an outbreak of cholera. For two months he was virtually isolated from his superiors, talking weekly on a short-wave radio to a CDC doctor in Hawaii to report progress and get advice. He and the health officials on Truk discovered that cholera, previously thought to be transmitted only in water, apparently was also being spread by infected people handling food in the victims' homes. Says Holmberg: "Knowing it is a food-borne disease may make quite a difference...
These mundane realities include the litany of woes that visit the unemployed in W.D. Wetherell's If a Woodchuck Could Chuck Wood: "The rags stuffed against drafts. The doctor's bills. The gas. The bare tires. The lottery tickets. The part-time jobs. The patches. The cutting back. The cold. The stove. The wood. The goddamn wood." John Updike's The City follows Computer Salesman Bob Carson's readjustment after an appendectomy: he was "trying to take again into himself the miracle of the world, programming himself." The aged farmer of William F. Van Wert...
...heroes of these tales have one thing in common: both come from Vicksburg, Miss. So does Hubert ("Baby") Levaster, a doctor hooked on booze, drugs and depravity, who packs a .410 shotgun pistol (its shells stuffed with popcorn) and steers the brain-damaged French Edward around the pro tennis tour. "Levaster banged him a hard blow against the heart. He saw French come alive and turn a happy regard to the court." What happens when these three characters mix, along with their assorted relatives, friends and lovers, is deliberately unbelievable; in extending two stories into a sketchy novel, Hannah creates...