Verghese's marriage is unraveling. He relocates to El Paso, Texas, hoping to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. He meets David, a medical student and former tennis pro, and their matches reawaken Verghese's passion for the game. As David's life takes some disturbing turns, Verghese finds himself forced to choose between his role as friend and that of authority figure.

MY OWN COUNTRY is the extraordinary story of an Indian physician who settled in a rural town in Tennessee as a young doctor to AIDS patients. This is a book about illness and treatment, about how a small community reacts to the advent of AIDS, about doctor-patient relationships, the body in decline, the ritual of examination, and how Verghese, as a doctor, coped with the inevitability of death. Verghese creates, beyond the jargon of medicine, a lyrical...

" At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. "When Breath Becomes Air" chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the...