Oldie but Goodie: Cutting for Stone

The Wind Blows in Sleeping Grass: Rev... Worth Two in the Bush

Oldie but Goodie: Cutting for Stone

I have a book for you—an oldie. I missed it the first time around, but when friends kept recommending The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese, I ran across that book’s bestselling predecessor Cutting for Stone, a 650+ page wonder I cannot put down. The writing is utterly delicious.

Ever read it?

Here’s the gist—from various editions’ cover copy:

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.

From the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tin operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, this is both a richly visceral epic and riveting family story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever entwined.

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While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive, let these pics and musings distract you. Next Saturday you’ll also find them as part of my new Substack: Birds in the Hand. Hope to meet you there.

From earlier: Poker face.

Find your mittens and hunker down. The big blow’s coming.

“For You are . . . a refuge from the storm . . .”

—Isaiah 25:4

and now it’s here! Brrrr, with gusts to 50.

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Somethin’s cooking.

(Got any bread puns? Looking for rye humor…)

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This sweet encouragement showed up online this week!

Thanks for reading, Tiffany @ Storyboard: the Community.

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Teach Your Children Well

“You who are on the road

Must have a code that you can live by

And so become yourself

Because the past is just a good-bye.

Teach your children well.

. . . And you, of tender years,

Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by,

And so please help them with your youth,

They seek the truth before they can die. ”

—Crosby, Stills & Nash

“Assemble the people before me to hear my words so that they may learn to revere me as long as they live in the land and may teach them to their children.”

—Deuteronomy 4:10

(Whatcom County’s trumpeter swans.)

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