My Own Country is the story of an Indian physician who settled in a rural town in Tennessee as a young doctor to AIDS patients. This book is about illness andtreatment, about how a small community reacts to the advent of AIDS, about doctor-patient relationships, the body in decline, the ritual of examination, and how Verghese, as a doctor, coped with the inevitability of death. Verghese creates, beyond the jargon of medicine, a lyrical and haunting languageunique in this genre, and provides a narrative both rich and absorbing and aboveall, moving.