Word: kristina
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Yoghurt in Paris. At 32, pretty Kristina Czaykowska, the heroine of Paris Original, is a receptionist in "Maison Deschamps," a Parisian stronghold of haute couture. She feels more like a shopworn beauty than a sleeping one. In the spring of 1947, she is three years away from her native Warsaw and eight years estranged from a husband who opted for the "People's Poland." She lives on yoghurt and corn bread, scurries home each night to her lonely, thimble-sized flat, and keeps telling herself that Paris is wonderful. But the only Paris Kristina knows, the goldfish bowl...
...want to stay alive," a friend advises her, "you must fight, not sneer. You might think that this is Paris, a safe capital, but it is like any place-the jungle." More bent on escape than combat, Kristina runs into an old flame, Jas Ostrowski. A few glasses of vodka make Jas talkative. "Now, the good girls differ only in one respect from the bad ones," he says. "You lose a tremendous amount of time on them." Kristina is ready and eager to make up for lost time when her long-gone husband shows up with the same idea...
When Lucas' father stopped sending money during his college pre-med course, the boy borrowed; and when he failed to borrow enough, he married for money-not much money, and not, by his standards, much of a woman. Kristina was a well-built Swedish girl from Minnesota who had read nothing, talked and dressed like an immigrant, and called him "Lu-key." But she was the head operating-room nurse at the university hospital, and she loved Luke in spite of all his inhuman fanaticism for his career. She put him through medical school. For Luke...
...when he went into practice as a small-town doctor's assistant, Lucas came upon more shocking specimens: doctors who let old, indigent patients die to get them out of the way, doctors who refused to answer night calls, a doctor who was a thief. As for Kristina, she was a wonder as a part-time nurse in the shabby county hospital, but as a doctor's wife she was a social embarrassment...
...novel's end, Dr. Lucas Marsh has learned that most men are compromisers, has learned to live with the facts of life without compromising too much himself. He has even learned that Kristina's virtues have it all over drawing-room talents. Most of all, Not as a Stranger is a heartwarming though crudely repetitive story of a passionate idealist whose passion is medicine. No novel ever written has contained more authentic, hard-won facts about doctors, patients, hospitals. Hypochondriacs will devour it; few of those who are not will consider its nearly 1,000 pages a waste...