by Ben Fulton || THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE JAN 2010

Abraham Verghese is an accomplished doctor with a storied career, not to mention current professor and senior associate chair for the theory and practice of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

He’s also the kind of modest overachiever most people love to hate. After all, on top of his accomplishments in medicine, he writes like a dream.

Evidence is Cutting for Stone, a Mexican-jumping-bean of a novel that spans the lives of twin brothers across India, Ethiopia and New York City. It’s a 650-plus-page opus that’s no doubt been responsible for countless “sick days” among those who find themselves luxuriously enmeshed in its all-too-human story lines of hope, love and loss. Fellow writers Atul Gawande and Simon Schama — hardly slouches themselves — have praised Verghese’s novel to high hosannas.

Verghese is a 1991 graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, but his talent also matured under a rigorous doctor’s schedule that began when he came to the United States as a foreign medical graduate serving an open residency position at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City.

“When you’re helping a patient, you listen to their stories, looking for clues that will tie their condition together into one entity,” Verghese said during an interview from his Stanford office. “The whole notion of reading the body as text, and trying to figure out what that text is saying, has deep parallels.” >>MORE

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