Cherubs in the Land of Lucifer

Healthcare in the United States is trapped between this nexus of incredible advances and the loss of personal relationships between physicians and patients. One of the tragedies of these developments that has gone largely unrecognized by the American public is a subversive effect upon the dying experience. We physicians are now trained in mass numbers. With each passing year, the bureaucratic regulations that are handed down take us farther and farther from patient ownership and closer to speciality and anonymity.

Cherubs is not explicitly about any of this. It is the story of a father and a son. One of them is a doctor, the other is dying. It is the story about their lives, both together and individually. It is also a story about babies, because the doctor is a neonatologist, and about how babies experience death. But woven into this book is also the theme of what is wrong in modern medicine, and perhaps with American culture itself, both manifest in the global dying experience. So in a sense, death in America is the backdrop and the inspiration behind the book.

The author was also inspired by two other great medical memoirs: ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL and HOUSE OF GOD.

Short book reviews can be found within the comments to the author section at the Cherubs in the Land of Lucifer website. One reader wrote, "The introduction caught my breath and the Sin of the Serpent had me in tears. Thank you for writing this. You really have a gift for putting your experiences into very meaningful words." Another wrote, "HOLY COW, it's riveting. This is GOOD. yetch, that snake--very good. I can practically smell the damn thing...and the minute you introduced the vipers I knew something would happen. Great sense of foreboding."

The author is available for limited public appearances and can be contacted through the book website.