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Cutting for Stone Paperback – January 26, 2010

by Abraham Verghese (Author)

4,051 customer reviews

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Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A winner. . . . Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters. . . . Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist.”
—USA Today

“A masterpiece. . . . Not a word is wasted in this larger-than-life saga. . . . Verghese expertly weaves the threads of numerous story lines into one cohesive opus. The writing is graceful, the characters compassionate and the story full of nuggets of wisdom.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Lush and exotic. . . . The kind [of novel] Richard Russo or Cormac McCarthy might write. . . . Shows how history and landscape and accidents of birth conspire to create the story of a single life. . . . Verghese creates this story so lovingly that it is actually possible to live within it for the brief time one spends with this book. You may never leave the chair.”
—Los Angeles Times

“Vivid. . . . Cutting for Stone shines.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“Absorbing, exhilarating. . . . If you’re hungry for an epic . . . open the covers of Cutting for Stone, [then] don’t expect to do much else.”
—The Seattle Times

“Wildly imaginative. . . . Verghese has the rare gift of showing his characters in different lights as the story evolves, from tragedy to comedy to melodrama, with an ending that is part Dickens, part Grey’s Anatomy. The novel works as a family saga, but it is also something more, a lovely ode to the medical profession.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Compelling. . . . Readers will put this novel down at book’s end knowing that it will stick with them for a long time to come.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“The novel is full of compassion and wise vision. . . . I feel I changed forever after reading this book, as if an entire universe had been illuminated for me. It’s an astonishing accomplishment to make such a foreign world familiar to a reader by the book’s end.”
—Sandra Cisneros, San Antonio Express-News

“Tremendous. . . . Vivid and thrilling. . . . I feel lucky to have gotten to read it.”
—Atul Gawande

“The first novel from physician Verghese displays the virtues so evident in his bestselling and much-lauded memoirs. He has a knack for well-structured scenes, a passion for medicine and a gift for communicating that passion.”
—Cleveland Plain-Dealer

“Fantastic. . . . Written with a lyrical flair, told through a compassionate first-person point of view, and rich with medical insight and information, [Cutting for Stone] makes for a memorable read.”
—Houston Chronicle

“Vastly entertaining and enlightening.”
—Tracy Kidder

About the Author

Abraham Verghese is Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, he is the author of My Own Country, a 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a Time Best Book of the Year; The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book; and, most recently, the critically acclaimed novel Cutting for Stone, which was a national bestseller. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. In 2016 Verghese received a National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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Product details

Paperback: 667 pages
Publisher: Vintage Books; 1st edition (January 26, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375714367
ISBN-13: 978-0375714368
Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.1 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4,051 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #14 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Medical
- #178 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Saga
- #378 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Life

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Sprawling Dickensian novel: some terrific writing, lots of coincidence and calamity...

March 30, 2013

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Cutting for Stone is Abraham Verghese's big, bloated panorama of 20th century Ethiopia, where medicine and religion meet, and surgeons and Carmelite nuns procreate. The book is a roller coaster ride of agonies and ecstasies that too often relies heavily on coincidence to move the plot along. Add to the end result a rather annoying voice of an omniscient narrator (vividly detailing his breach birth, for example), a marvelous ability to evoke atmosphere and some interesting detail about medicine, and the result is a bouillabaisse of a book, with a few questionable ingredients.

After Thomas Stone and Sister Mary Joseph Praise create their twin progeny Shiva/Marion, CFS slows down for a few hundred pages, exploring the mystic cords (umbilical and otherwise) that bind. Not that it is bad, just too much of a bland thing at times. The second third off the book sets a languorous pace too that takes 150 pages to get the boys to puberty. It would be unfair to say the book bogs down, but it definitely would have benefited from a quicker pace or editing.

The last third is the exact opposite--a series of frenetic coincidences and crises that occasionally seem contrived or created solely to wring every last tear from the reader. Some of it works, other times I found myself rolling my eyes. It was during one of these more implausible instances that it occurred to me the author--for better and for worse--reminds me of Charles Dickens, whom I quite like. Warts and all.

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Elements of my childhood woven into this wonderful story

September 12, 2016

Verified Purchase

I was born in Ethiopia in 1950 to missionaries with the American Mission. Much of this story took place in Addis Ababa. I could see the sights and smell the food. I wept at parts, shook my head in dismay at parts. I thought Haile Selassie was my grandfather when I was a little girl, so I have a hard time with negative views of him. When he came to the states to visit Jack & Jackie, he flew into the Philadelphia airport, then boarded a Train to arrive in DC with all the fanfare appropriate for royalty. My dad took us down onto the tarmack at the airport to greet the Emperor when he got off the plane and into his limo! The protocol officer was annoyed, but my mother was able to have words with the Emperor's Aide.

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Rockstar

Well Written

January 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

It took me about 1/3 the way through this book to get into it. I was seriously at the point of giving up. I stayed with it and was very moved. Similar emotional invocation as the Kite Runner, except not as good. I could do without the life lessons through surgical procedure. Although I related and empathized with Marion and life, I could have done without the details of surgery. Half clinical and really tedious.

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Harish Nair

Gripping till the end

December 28, 2014

Verified Purchase

A very touching story of two brothers- twins- who lose their mother as they are born and a story of a country – Ethyo-pia. The twins who were conjoine when they were born, surgically separate but remained conjoined at soul .The book become very enjoyable because of the style of writing. Dr. Verghese.

The book brings out various facets of the country and gives a good perspective of the society for readers to understand and appreciate the ways of life. The turbulence therein has been interwoven so well with the lives of the characters of the story to make a gripping reading. Even though it is not a thriller and given that it is loaded with high technical stuff on medicine and surgery, still I found it difficult to stop my reading at any point. And there were so many details interspersed into the writing, which made it very difficult for me to rush through the pages. So, it was like a strong cup of coffee, the bitterness kept me from finishing it fast, but the taste kept me wanting for more.

It also threw some philosophical angle for what one carries through the life and how the unspoken torments. How the slipper just refuses to leave your feet, unless you look down and acknowledge it in the first place. And also that it’s the noble end which matters, noble means does not.

I would highly recommend this book for all my friends

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Veering Toward Melodrama

November 11, 2012

Verified Purchase

This is an ambitious project. And like many ambitious novels, Cutting For Stone walks a tightrope between admission to the literary canon and the agony of reaching too high. Perhaps only history itself is the best judge of such books, but for me the book leans toward the latter.

It's the story of two boys - Marion and Shiva, who take on the surname of the doctor who delivered them, Thomas Stone. The two boys are twins, extracted from the womb of a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, and joined at the head by a tubal tissue that possibly threatens the lives of the boys until it's severed. And this birth condition sets the book's surest but most underdeveloped metaphor. The sister dies, and the presumed father, Thomas Stone, abruptly makes tracks, wanting nothing to do with the boys. They are then adopted by Ghosh, an ad hoc surgeon, and Ghosh's heartthrob an Indian nun, Hema.
Shiva is matter-of-fact smart, expending little effort to achieve his goal of becoming a doctor, while Marion has to work at it. And then there's Genet, a female waif who grows up with the two boys and is eager, as they become aware of their sexuality, to have one or the other deflower her, as she puts it.
The story takes place largely in Ethiopia during the last days of Haile Selassie's reign. The author places these characters within that bit of history, the unrest that follows Selassie's demise as ruler and the ensuing urge to revolution in Africa's horn. It's this aspect of the story that I enjoyed the most - the crumbling of that nation's ancient foundation, the blending of Christian, Hindu, and Islamic cultures there.

Historic epics are the grander end of literature, and Verghese clearly had this in mind when writing the book. But there are technical aspects of the story that simply don't work. The author allows Marion to narrate the story - including the weeks prior to his and Shiva's birth, their infancy, and much later during Marion's surgery. The manner is which this is accomplished has the effect of forcing Marion into an awkwardly unrealistic omniscient point of view little suited to first person narration. Too, the characters, by Western standards, have altogether too many stilted conversations. This may be the manner of Ethiopian language and conversing, but these scenes seem more like TV dialogue than revealing literary dynamics.
Thomas Stone and Genet show up again at story's end, but the purpose of both seems wasted, other than trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible. Still, there are many alleys and streets in this novel that lead nowhere, story-wise, or metaphorically, and I couldn't help imagining Charles Scribner slicing and dicing the manuscript to half its length, as he did with those of Hemingway near the end of that fabled writer's career. Altogether, then, these technical aspects of the book give it a rather melodramatic tone, something I'm sure the author didn't intend. Clearly the author's vision for the book was ambitious, but it's the manner in which this was carried out that forces me to lean to the nay-saying side of Verghese's literary tightrope.

My rating 12 of 20 stars

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