All That Really Matters by David Weill; Los Angeles: Rare Bird Books; (c)2024; ISBN 9781644-284353; 309 pages plus acknowledgments; $28. Publication date: June 11.
SAN DIEGO — Protagonist Joe Bosco rises to the top of his field in heart and lung transplant surgeries, but never feels he is living up to the expectations of his father, a Nobel Prize winning medical researcher and the president of a prestigious university.
When self-destructive behavior results in an operating room calamity, Bosco, whose Jewish family changed its name from Boscowitz, goes off the rails.
This novel is a story of love, loss, and redemption with authoritative descriptions of transplant surgeries. First-time novelist Weill formerly directed the heart-lung transplant program at Stanford University.
The novel contains pleas for more transparency in the allocation system for transplanted organs, with compelling descriptions of how some unethical hospitals could endanger patients’ lives by purposely making them sicker in order to move up them up on the transplant eligibility list. It also details how some unethical hospitals could keep patients with no chance of recovery on respirators past one year, which is the cut-off time for health agencies determining whether a transplant was successful or unsuccessful.
It also explores how some foreign patients could pay tremendous sums of money just to be placed illegally on the U.S. transplant list, fattening the bottom line of transplant centers.
Alternating medical exegesis with a meaningful romance and meaningless hook-ups, the book moves along at a quick clip. The chapters are short, inviting the story to be consumed in bite-size chunks for those who do not have the time for prolonged reading sessions.
I think it is a fine first novel; I came away feeling I had learned something while being entertained.
*
Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.