Customer Reviews

Charlie Rose with Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland; Griffin Dunne; Reynolds Price (May 21, 1997)

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The opening segment is with Dr. Sherwin Nuland who talks about his new book, "The Wisdom of the Body." Nuland argues that the body is a remarkably stable system which is working constantly and in many ways to maintain itself. He talks about the interconnections between different elements in the body as the key to this process. He says that with age however the system tends to show a greater failure in its ability to repair itself. He also speaks about his own frightening experience in which he was diagnosed as having a prostate cancer that had metastasized. He was given six months to live. He says threw him into a panic. He began to wonder and regret over whether his wife and children would be able to maintain the home and life- style they had. He began too to have regrets. He says that when he learned about the misdiagnosis he gained a deeper sense of the beauty of life, the wonders of the natural world. Rose asks him about his religious belief and he says he is an agnostic. He believes that humans find it impossible to accept their own mortality and thus dream up the idea of an other world.
In the segment with Reynolds Price Rose has a convivial conversation with his old teacher and friend. Price who has been in a wheel- chair for thirteen years talks about the tumor he had on his spinal- cord, the operation which saved his life. He speaks about his work as novelist, his career teaching at Duke. He at the end of the segment reads a poem about his condition in which he tells about feeling in his dreams that he is flying.
Price also speaks about Literature and the novelists he most admires, Tolstoy above all, and then Flaubert.
I did not find Price however congenial especially inspiring or poetic. But it was good to once again see Charlie Rose treating an old friend and in this case mentor with respect and appreciation.