With insight and an eye for telling detail (playing in a bluegrass band; a performance as a singing telegram), Sohn recounts his adventures, career shifts, many homes, and establishment of his own family. His youth pulses with Boomer touchstones—parking on dates, “distrust of anyone over thirty,” 1970s hitchhiking, the father who declares, over shoulder-length hair, “Go get it cut or move out.” What startles, as Sohn builds a life of purpose and consequence, is how his abbreviated period of wanderlust continues to haunt him, even as it has become a truism, in the U.S., that young men often take a few years to find a path.
Sohn shares hard-won insight into his times (hippies, he notes, were “people of all sorts with the same flaws shared by ‘straight’ society”) and choices, and later, the opioid crisis and challenges facing physicians, though the amiable telling lacks the narrative tension or momentum of top memoirs. Still, Sohn writes strong, incisive scenes, inspiring moments of self-discovery on mountain peaks and in life itself, and memorable portraits of patients, professors, friends, and more.
Takeaway: Thoughtful account of a shiftless Boomer kid finding himself and becoming a doctor.
Comparable Titles: Luissa Kiprono’s Push, Then Breathe, Jim Merkel’s Growing Up St. Louis.
Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B
Marketing copy: A-
