Chamán

Por Noah Gordon

Segunda entrega de la saga de la familia Cole, en la que el legado familiar adquiere una importancia de proporciones épicas en la vida de dos médicos en la América del siglo XVIII. Escocés y vástago de una familia que ha practicado la medicina a lo largo de generaciones, el doctor Robert Judson Cole debe dejar su devastada tierra por razones políticas y emigar a las nuevas tierras de América, tras llegar a Boston y trabajar con el eminente cirujano Oliver Wendell Holmes, seguirá camino rumbo al oeste hasta la frontera de Illinois y de allí a las tierras castigadas por la guerra de Gettysburg, un territorio que los colonos todavía no han podido arrebatar a los indios sauk, y donde le esperan las experiencias más intensas de su vida profesional y sentimental.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Roca editorial
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 28 abr 2011
• ISBN: 9788499183084

Noah Gordon

Noah Gordon has had outstanding international success, selling in Germany alone more than eight million copies of his trilogy The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice. The Society of American Historians awarded him the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Shaman as the best historical novel of 1991/1992.  He was also voted "Novelist of the Year" by the readers of the Bertelsmann Book Club, and twice, in 1992 and 1995, he won the Silver Basque Prize for Spain's bestselling book. An earlier book, The Rabbi, was on the New York Times Bestseller list for 26 weeks.  Noah Gordon lives with his wife in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Comentarios para Chamán

[brewbooks · Calificación: 5 de 5 estrellas]

I thought this was a fascinating work of historical fiction and science. This is a thoroughly researched novel, it brought alive what it was like for a young person to be growing up in the mid 19th century America. Three scenes resonated with me, and I am going to describe them, as I'd like to remember them.In the first, Shaman (the protagonist) is attending college. He is a 15 year old deaf student - who is very interested in science and medicine. In this scene he decides that his future will be medicine: "He watched until the stars seemed to wheel, enormous and glittering. What had formed them up there, out there? And the stars beyond? And beyond? ...He felt that each star and planet was part of a complicated system, like a bone in a skeleton, or a drop of blood in a body. So much of nature seemed organized, thought out - so orderly, and yet so complicated. What had made it so? .... The stars were magical but all you could do is watch them. If a heavenly body went awry, you couldn't ever hope to make it well again."The second scene that struck me is when the 25 year old Shaman learns that his father had been been working with a merchant neighbor to help run a section of the Underground Railroad. Shaman is surprised that: "The plump, balding merchant didn't look heroic or appear the kind of person who would risk everything for a principle in defiance of the law. Shaman was filled with admiration for the steely secret man who inhabited Cliburne.s soft storekeeper body." George Cliburne, is a Quaker with a philosophical bent, who persuades Shaman to attend a Quaker meeting. The Quaker principles suit Shaman, who eventually seems to adopt them as his own. Finally, near the end of the book, Shaman is teaching a human anatomy lesson, much as his father taught him. He says:"No matter how soiled the human body is, it's a miracle to be marveled at and treated well. When a person dies, the soul or spirit - what the Greeks called anemos - leaves it. Men have always argued about whether it dies to, or it goes elsewhere. ... the spirit leaves the body behind the way someone leaves a house he's lived in."This is a book abut two men - father and son coming to maturity. I found it well worth reading, it made me think about lessons I might impart to my own son.