"The textbooks were filled with the medical ignorance of the day, now worthless rubbish that could not even be sold to the dealers on Fourth Avenue. And yet he could not throw them out. Once he loved them and learned from them. They were like aging teachers whose time had passed." page 33by Pete Hamill
Hamill will be the next speaker for the Rosamond Gifford Lecture series. I plan to read this and one of his nonfiction titles within the next month.
The rest of the above paragraph (just because I love it):
"Then his eyes fell to the lower shelves, full of treasures. Dickens and Stevenson and Mark Twain. Conrad and Galsworthy, Henry James and Edith Wharton. On one shelf, Theodore Dreiser leaned against Dostoyevsky, and he remembered how sure he once was that they were snarling at each other, each filled with certainty. To their left, unable to soothe them was the good Dr. Chekhov. With any luck these books will be the patrimony of the boy. And who will teach him how to read?"
and finally...
"...he would read novels to know more about human beings, who were, after all, his basic subject, and still were. The medical books didn't tell such stories. Only novels did."
Thanks for letting me indulge in this (very) extended teaser. Find more teasers at MizB's blog, Should Be Reading.
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