Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, Hardcover: 560 pages, Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (February 3, 2009), ISBN-10: 0375414495
Rating: 5 of 5 STARS
Source: Farming of Books Book Club January selection (See sidebar at bottom)
This is a big, fat, beautiful book. Read it. It's about all the really important stuff of life: faith, family, love, abandonment, hope, calling. Mainly, it's a story told by Marion Stone, identical twin to Shiva Stone, born to an English surgeon and Indian nun in an Ethiopian mission hospital. At birth they were abandoned by one parent through death and the other through mental weakness and shock. It's a rambling, reaching story covering the lives their birth parents, their adoptive parents, and the wide assortment of people who shaped them into the physicians they one day both came to be.
Verghese is an amazing writer. He uses no extra words. No rabbit trails are explored without a later purpose. He's woven together an incredible story that ties up cleanly at the end. To give a book a '5 of 5' rating, it has to be one that I'll ponder over for weeks after finishing. Cutting for Stone easily fits in that category. The characters seemed incredibly real to me, and completely believable.
Oh - if the story itself doesn't grab you, then the setting of Ethiopia will. If that doesn't, then the details of a surgeon's life in either New York or a mission hospital in Africa will. Really, try it.
For some "Good Words" from Cutting for Stone, click here.
Rating: 5 of 5 STARS
Source: Farming of Books Book Club January selection (See sidebar at bottom)
This is a big, fat, beautiful book. Read it. It's about all the really important stuff of life: faith, family, love, abandonment, hope, calling. Mainly, it's a story told by Marion Stone, identical twin to Shiva Stone, born to an English surgeon and Indian nun in an Ethiopian mission hospital. At birth they were abandoned by one parent through death and the other through mental weakness and shock. It's a rambling, reaching story covering the lives their birth parents, their adoptive parents, and the wide assortment of people who shaped them into the physicians they one day both came to be.
Verghese is an amazing writer. He uses no extra words. No rabbit trails are explored without a later purpose. He's woven together an incredible story that ties up cleanly at the end. To give a book a '5 of 5' rating, it has to be one that I'll ponder over for weeks after finishing. Cutting for Stone easily fits in that category. The characters seemed incredibly real to me, and completely believable.
Oh - if the story itself doesn't grab you, then the setting of Ethiopia will. If that doesn't, then the details of a surgeon's life in either New York or a mission hospital in Africa will. Really, try it.
For some "Good Words" from Cutting for Stone, click here.
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3 comments:
I agree - it's a great book! I loved it and am planning to read some of Verghese's non-fiction this year.
Wonderful review!
sold! I'm adding it to my list!
Blessings!
This one is on my list. I hope I get to it soon.
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