The story of psychoanalyst Dr. Fine, from an idealistic medical school graduate, through disillusionment and detachment, to a new sense of self-discovery

Fine

Literature & Fiction

Shem, Samuel

United States

St Martins Pr

From the Laws of Mount Misery: There are no laws in psychiatry. Now, from the author of the riotous, moving, bestselling classic, The House of God, comes a lacerating and brilliant novel of doctors and patients in a psychiatric hospital. Mount Misery is a prestigious facility set in the rolling green hills of New England, its country club atmosphere maintained by generous corporate contributions. Dr. Roy Basch (hero of The House of God) is lucky enough to train there *only to discover doctors caught up in the circus of competing psychiatric theories, and patients who are often there for one main reason: they've got good insurance. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Your colleagues will hurt you more than your patients. On rounds at Mount Misery, it's not always easy for Basch to tell the patients from the doctors: Errol Cabot, the drug cowboy whose practice provides him with guinea pigs for his imaginative prescription cocktails . . . Blair Heiler, the world expert on borderlines (a diagnosis that applies to just about everybody) . . . A. K. Lowell, née Aliyah K. Lowenschteiner, whose Freudian analytic technique is so razor sharp it prohibits her from actually speaking to patients . . . And Schlomo Dove, the loony, outlandish shrink accused of having sex with a beautiful, well-to-do female patient. From the Laws of Mount Misery: Psychiatrists specialize in their defects. For Basch the practice of psychiatry soon becomes a nightmare in which psychiatrists compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce human beings to blubbering drug-addled pods, or incite them to an extreme where excessive rage is the only rational response, or tie them up in Freudian knots. And all the while, the doctors seem less interested in their patients' mental health than in a host of other things *managed care insurance money, drug company research grants and kickbacks, and their own professional advancement. From the Laws of Mount Misery: In psychiatry, first comes treatment, then comes diagnosis. What The House of God did for doctoring the body, Mount Misery does for doctoring the mind. A practicing psychiatrist, Samuel Shem brings vivid authenticity and extraordinary storytelling gifts to this long-awaited sequel, to create a novel that is laugh-out-loud hilarious, terrifying, and provocative. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, Mount Misery tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a lot funnier.

Mount Misery: A Novel

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Ballantine Books

An intern becomes disillusioned with the medical establishment when he sees his fellow interns fall for the illusions that destroy a doctor's ability to relate to and really care for his patients

The House of God

Humor & Satire

Richard Marek Publishers

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and utterly human, The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative novel about Roy Basch and five of his fellow interns at the most renowned teaching hospital in the country. “The raunchy, troubling, and hilarious novel that turned into a cult phenomenon. Singularly compelling…brutally honest.”—The New York Times Struggling with grueling hours and sudden life-and-death responsibilities, Basch and his colleagues, under the leadership of their rule-breaking senior resident known only as the Fat Man, must learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings. A phenomenon ever since it was published, The House of God was the first unvarnished, unglorified, and uncensored portrait of what training to become a doctor is truly like, in all its terror, exhaustion and black comedy. With more than two million copies sold worldwide, it has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels ever written. With an introduction by John Updike

BERKLEY

From the bestselling author of the The House of God comes an ambitious novel about the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, doctors and patients, the past and the present, and love and death... Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death. On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,” he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town. There's one odd catch: he must live in her house for one year and thirteen days. As he struggles with his decision—to stay and meet the terms of the will or return to his life in Italy—Orville reconnects with family, reunites with former friends, and comes to terms with old rivals and bitter memories. In the process he’ll discover his own history, as well as his mother’s, and finally learn what it really means to be a healer, and to be healed.

The Spirit of the Place

Penguin Publishing Group

We have to talk.” For many men, these are the four worst words in the English language, especially when they're uttered by a female partner. But it doesn't have to be that way, argue Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey in their pathbreaking and practical new book. Male relational dread”that all-too-familiar reaction set off by women's relational yearnings”can be tamed, and in its place can emerge true satisfaction for men and women.To demonstrate how this is done, Shem and Surrey take us behind the scenes of their popular workshops. We hear couples speak intimately about anger, guilt, resentment, shame, and sex. We watch them wrestle collectively with the gender divide in their relationshipsthe deep disconnects, or impasses,” that reflect the vastly different developmental paths men and women have traveled. We see couples learn to bridge the poles of dread and yearning, to emerge from isolation into mutuality. We witness their moments of sadness, humor, and, ultimately, discovery.Filled with moving stories of real people struggling with real problems, We Have to Talk shatters the rules” and offers dramatic proof that men and women are not from different planets after all. It is certain to be seen as the relationship book for the new millennium.

We Have To Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Women And Men

Surrey, Janet

Bergman, Stephen

Parenting & Relationships

Basic Books

Mount Misery

Contemporary

Black Swan.

House of God

The medical hierarchy of The House of God is like a pyramid - a lot at the bottom and one at the top. Roy Basch, a Rhodes scholar, thinks differently, until he meets Hyper Hooper, out to win the most post-mortems of the year award, or Molly, the nurse with the crash helmet.

Genre Fiction

Drama / 3m, 3f (w/doubling) / Unit set Newly revised edition! From the author of the best-selling novel, The House of God, this critically acclaimed version which played Off-Broadway in 2007, tells the amazing story of the two men who pioneered Alcoholics Anonymous, and of their wives, who founded Al Anon. During the roaring '20s, New York stockbroker Bill Wilson rides high on money, fame, and booze. In '29, both he and the market crash and he becomes a hopeless drunk. Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon in Akron, Ohio, and a pillar of the community, has been a secret drunk for thirty years, often going into the operating room hungover and high on sedatives. His family has tried everything to no avail. Through an astonishing series of events involving doctors, ministers, the Oxford Group evangelical movement, and Henrietta Sieberling a scion of the Goodyear Rubber fortune, Bill and Bob meet on Mother's Day of 1935. The two men form a relationship which keeps each sober. Fired up, they seek out a third drunk to see if their program will work for others. Richly textured with the ragtime and jazz of the era, the play tells a magnificent American success story. "A deeply human, audience embracing tale." - Variety "One of the best plays of the year." - San Diego Union Tribune "Inspiring." - Boston Globe

Bill W. and Dr. Bob

Dadey, Debbie

Dramas & Plays

Concord Theatricals

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shem, Samuel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shem, Samuel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shem, Samuel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fine

Mount Misery: A Novel

The House of God

The House of God

The Spirit of the Place

We Have To Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Women And Men

We Have To Talk: Healing Dialogues Between Women And Men

Mount Misery

House of God

Bill W. and Dr. Bob