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Enjoy your Father’s Day - and if you have a great dad, thank him with a gift of some of his favorite books!
The summer of 1965 is a pivotal time in American history. As the Vietnam War expands toward its ultimate heavy American involvement, the Watts Riots presage the urban unrest of the late 1960s.
This insightful novel follows newlywed couple Max and Jan King, who have just graduated college and are both preparing to start med school at MCLA, a former osteopathic college in East Los Angeles. Max returns to his summer job selling encyclopedias door-to-door, while Jan works in the school’s lab.
Max’s long work hours create a gap in the couple’s previous 24/7 harmonious relationship, which becomes strained due to their incompatible work times. He hangs out a lot with his friend, Art Burton, a brainy Stanford pre-law graduate, who has encyclopedic knowledge of current events and warns about America’s creep toward a full commitment fighting in Vietnam. Max is also exposed to the enticement of drug use and the free love era. This story is truly a Requiem for the Sixties.
Read the medical trilogy by Henry Rex Greene
Max and Jan King start their internships at LA county hospital at the end of the sixties. Max finds his way after four difficult years of medical school. Jan struggles with an abusive program. Max meets Abe Grant, an activist, the son of a communist and is drawn into far left politics. During the year conditions become untenable at the hospital. The young physicians on the internal medicine service hold a heal in protesting sub-standard care. In the end the establishment resident who chairs the Intern-Resident association co-opts them and wheedles a pay raise for everyone that takes the steam out of their activism. At the end of the year Max becomes chair of the activist group and learns that their pay raise came out of the hospital's clinical budget and has put them right back in the same mess.