Island Practice: Cobblestone Rash, Underground Tom, and Other Adventures of a Nantucket Doctor
About this audiobook
If you need an appendectomy, he can do it with a stone scalpel he fashioned himself. If you have a condition nobody can diagnose—"creeping eruption" perhaps—he can identify what it is and treat it. A baby with hair tourniquet syndrome, a human leg that's washed ashore, a horse with Lyme disease, a narcoleptic falling face-first in the street, a hermit living underground—hardly anything is off-limits for Dr. Timothy J. Lepore.
This is the spirited, true story of a colorful, contrarian doctor on the world-famous island of Nantucket. Thirty miles out to sea, in a strikingly offbeat place known for wealthy summer people but also home to independent-minded, idiosyncratic year-rounders, Lepore holds the life of the island, often quite literally, in his hands. He's surgeon, medical examiner, football team doctor, tick expert, unofficial psychologist, accidental homicide detective, and occasional veterinarian. When crisis strikes, he's deeply involved.
Lepore has treated Jimmy Buffett, Chris Matthews, and various Kennedys, but he makes house calls for anyone and lets people pay him nothing—or anything: oatmeal-raisin cookies, a weather-beaten .44 Magnum, a picture of a Nepalese shaman.
Lepore can be controversial and contradictory, espousing conservative views while performing abortions and giving patients marijuana cookies. He has unusual hobbies: he's a gun fanatic, roadkill collector, and concocter of pastimes like knitting dog-hair sweaters.
Ultimately, Island Practice is about a doctor utterly essential to a community at a time when medicine is increasingly money driven and impersonal. Can he remain a maverick even as a health-care chain subsumes his hospital? Every community has—or, some would say, needs—a Doctor Lepore, and his island's drive to retain individuality in a cookie-cutter world is echoed across the country.
About the author
Pam Belluck has been a staff writer for the New York Times for more than fifteen years, during which time she has written about everything from cattle rustling to embryo adoption and reported from places as diverse as Medellín, Colombia, and Seongnam, South Korea. She served for more than a decade as national bureau chief, covering some of the biggest stories for the paper and is currently a health and medical writer. She has won several awards, a Knight Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship.
Nathaniel Philbrick is the National Book Award–winning author of In the Heart of the Sea, Revenge of the Whale, Sea of Glory, and others. Philbrick has won numerous awards for his work, including the Massachusetts Book Award, the Albion-Monroe Award, and the New England Book Award; his book Mayflower was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. His book The Last Stand was named an ALA Notable Book and was the basis for a two-hour PBS American Experience film called Custer’s Last Stand. A graduate of Duke and Brown Universities, he currently lives in New England.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto... with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.
