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194 pages, Hardcover
First published May 23, 2023
[M]y neighbor was, in the sunshine of an August Sunday morning, washing his girlfriend’s car. I couldn’t help but note that the vehicle in question was parked in the same spot where she had left it the night before ….
[He] was bare-chested, dressed only in a pair of old swim trunks. With a garden hose in one hand and a soapy sponge in the other, he flexed his muscular chest with each splash and swirl, while his wavy hair flopped rakishly over one eye.
This was Charlie White.
Age 102.
An American born in the early 1900s who managed to live into the 2000s would have one foot planted in the age of draft animals and diphtheria – a time when only 6 percent of Americans graduated from high school – and the other planted in the age of space stations and robotic surgery…. From women forbidden to vote to women running nations and corporations…. No human foot had ever touched the North or South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest when they were born, yet they lived to see footprints on the moon.
He had been on his own a long time. When he darted from a train and walked the last miles home from a pedophile's summer camp as an eight-year-old. When he drove halfway across the country on rutted roads and surfed freight trains home at sixteen. When he made himself a musician by listening to the radio and turned that little career into a college education and a trip halfway around the world. When he delivered babies and watched patients die and pumped his own blood into a Chicago gangster.The second half of the book beyond this point tells stories from his work as a physician and later, after service in World War II, as an anesthesiologist.