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The sequel to the bestselling and highly acclaimed The House of God Years after the events of The House of God, the Fat Man has been given leadership over a new Future of Medicine Clinic at what is now only Man's 4th Best Hospital, and has persuaded Dr. Roy Basch and some of his intern cohorts to join him to teach a new generation of interns and residents. In a medical landscape dominated by computer screens and corrupted by money, they have one goal: to make medicine humane again. What follows is a mesmerizing, heartbreaking, and hilarious exploration of how the health-care industry, and especially doctors, have evolved over the past thirty years.
Welcome to Mount Misery psychiatric hospital, home of the crazed, the suicidal, the Machiavellian and the wicked. And that's just the doctors. For Dr Roy Basch, proudly starting his residency there, it is a bewildering and nightmarish experience. The different disciplines appear to compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce the patients to gibbering wrecks. As he immerses himself in the system, he discovers that the process of treating the patients has less to do with making them better and more with maintaining the flow of insurance company money. Basch believes that he can find meaning here, but in an enclosed world which has lost its head, he soon finds that survival, not meaning, is the most valuable lesson he will learn. Mount Misery is hilarious, provocative and terrifying. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, it is an absorbing and authentic report from within the crumbling fortress of psychiatry and tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a sight funnier too.
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From the bestselling author of the The House of God comes an ambitious novel about the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, doctors and patients, the past and the present, and love and death... Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death. On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,” he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town. There's one odd catch: he must live in her house for one year and thirteen days. As he struggles with his decision—to stay and meet the terms of the will or return to his life in Italy—Orville reconnects with family, reunites with former friends, and comes to terms with old rivals and bitter memories. In the process he’ll discover his own history, as well as his mother’s, and finally learn what it really means to be a healer, and to be healed.
The story of two mothers and a father in love with the same daughter, Samuel Shem's At the Heart of the Universe is an epic novel set deep in rural China against the backdrop of an ancient mountain monastery during the time of the one-child-per-family policy. Inspired by the author's experiences as parent of an adopted child, it describes the drama of adoption and the journey of loss and rebirth that can happen when a daughter brings together her adopted mother and father with her birth mother high on a mountaintop. Set in 1991 in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, as a Chinese woman abandons her one-month-old daughter in a pile of celery in a busy market, and then shifting to Changsha ten years later as the daughter returns with her adopted American parents, the story moves across southern China until, high atop Emei San, one of China's "sacred mountains" with a Buddhist temple, the four are brought together in the wilderness—a perilous and explosive time that unleashes their heartbreak and suffering and, remarkably, transcends it to shared compassion, and new beginnings.
As women’s spirituality continues to gain popularity, The Buddha’s Wife offers to a broad audience for the first time the intimate and profound story of Princess Yasodhara, the wife Buddha left behind, and her alternative journey to spiritual enlightenment. What do we know of the wife and child the Buddha abandoned when he went off to seek his enlightenment? The Buddha’s Wife brings this rarely told story to the forefront, offering a nuanced portrait of this compelling and compassionate figure while also examining the practical applications her teachings have on our modern lives. Princess Yasodhara’s journey is one full of loss, grief, and suffering. But through it, she discovered he...
Drama / 3m, 3f (w/doubling) / Unit set Newly revised edition! From the author of the best-selling novel, The House of God, this critically acclaimed version which played Off-Broadway in 2007, tells the amazing story of the two men who pioneered Alcoholics Anonymous, and of their wives, who founded Al Anon. During the roaring '20s, New York stockbroker Bill Wilson rides high on money, fame, and booze. In '29, both he and the market crash and he becomes a hopeless drunk. Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon
"Aclear-sighted, heartfelt, and humane story of the needless tests and treatments that cripple healthcare....as a guide to good medicine, it may help us get back to the essence of what good doctors do: be with patients in healing." —Samuel Shem, M.D., author of The House of God and The Spirit of the Place In Hippocrates’ Shadow, Dr. David H. Newman upends our understanding of the doctor-patient relationship and offers a new paradigm of honesty and communication. He sees a disregard for the healing power of the bond that originated with Hippocrates, and, ultimately, a disconnect between doctors and their oath to"do no harm." Exposing the patterns of secrecy and habit in modern medicine’s carefully protected subculture, Dr. Newman argues that doctors and patients cling to tradition and yield to demands for pills or tests. Citing fascinating studies that show why antibiotics for sore throats are almost always unnecessary; how cough syrup is rarely more effective than a sugar pill; and why CPR is violent, invasive—and almost always futile, this thought-provoking book cuts to the heart of what really works, and what doesn’t, in medicine.
“We have to talk.” For many men, these are the four worst words in the English language, especially when they're uttered by a female partner. But it doesn't have to be that way, argue Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey in their pathbreaking and practical new book. “Male relational dread”—that all-too-familiar reaction set off by women's “relational yearnings”—can be tamed, and in its place can emerge true satisfaction for men and women.To demonstrate how this is done, Shem and Surrey take us behind the scenes of their popular workshops. We hear couples speak intimately about anger, guilt, resentment, shame, and sex. We watch them wrestle collectively with the gender divide in their...
Richard Gordon's acceptance into St Swithan's came as no surprise. However, it was a shock to discover that, once there, he would have to work. Fortunately, life proved not to be all work and no play. This hilarious hospital comedy is for anyone who wonders what medical students get up to. Just don't read it on the way to the doctor's!