President Moi's Personal Physician

 

My review of Heartbeat – An American Cardiologist in Kenya by David Silverstein, available from Amazon, 2023.

 David Silverstein was, as the title confirms, a cardiologist who pitched up in Kenya in the early seventies.  This book is his memoir starting with his childhood, education, medical school, a stint in Vietnam and then Kenya. He practiced in Nairobi and as the only heart specialist in the nation at the time attracted the rich and powerful who needed his services.

The book opens in the hospital emergency wards following the bombing of the U.S. embassy in 1998. That sets the tone for the story to come. The memoir is replete with brief case studies of individuals who required his medical services and a narrative of how more broadly viewed medical services in Kenya improved during the course of the past forty years.  (In fact, there was more medical recitation than I enjoyed, but those who are well versed in medicine will undoubtedly appreciate these sections.)

I did value Silverstein’s observations about Kenya’s political scene and its political elite. Many folks are mentioned but the two most prominent are President Daniel arap Moi and Attorney General Charles Njonjo.  Silverstein became doctor to both of them.  He saw them regularly and became friends with each. Since he was not involved with Kenyan politics, they had no agenda with him and his with them was medical, personal and supportive. Silverstein’s observations about the human side of the men rings true.

Silverstien portrayed Moi as a carefully spoken man who thought matters through before acting. Indeed, his observations of Moi add a dimension to the understanding of this complex leader.  Especially poignant was Silverstein’s care for Moi after he retired from the presidency and on into his last years.

 Anecdotes abound, for example, as part of the presidential entourage, Silverstien accompanied Moi on foreign trips. One such foray was into Iran, where Silverstein’s American citizenship and Jewish ethnicity, almost proved disastrous but instead turned into a good story.

Throughout the book, as is true with all memoirs, we learn about the author – what makes him tic, family issues, including two different sets of sons, and finally a wife to sustain him.  All in all, Heartbeat is an entertaining read, especially for those who knew Kenya from the seventies forward.

 

Castigation of the Raj

 

A review of Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux, Mariner Books, NYC, 2024

 

Theroux jumps back in time to take the actual sojourn of Eric Blair, later known by his pen name of George Orwell, in Burma in the 1920s and turn it into a novel.  Blair was a policeman for Britian, the imperial power of the country.  Theroux grafts onto the facts of Blair’s five years there to create a novel. Perhaps some of the internal machinations - places, people, and introspection - of the sojourn are drawn from records of the era.  But to his credit, Theroux exercises literary license in compiling a gripping and insightful novel.

Let there be no mistake this book is an indictment of the British Raj, of British rule in Asia.  Blair is a willing pawn in the oppressive imperial rule. Yet throughout, in his mind he questions most everything about his and his government’s presence in the Asian backwater.  The book tracks Blair’s thinking, his reactions, his rejections, his muses, his lusts, and his memories as the story progresses. Needless to say, Blair is a bundle of contradictions.  As with all of Theroux’s characters in his many books, no one is pure. All characters are complicated, and many are venal. That is certainly true in this story.  Theroux never seems to find many redeeming features in the people he creates.  This harsh criticism of people lends veracity to the story, but makes a reader wonder if the world is really that bleak?

There is no real plot to this book. It just tracks the five years that Blair spent in Burma. The reader wonders if the man will ever adjust or quit, but that is about it for suspense. 

Above criticism notwithstanding, I enjoyed the book. It is a well written page turner. It elucidates in fictional form a period in George Orwell’s life that helped shape his antiauthoritarian views that surfaced years later in Animal Farm and 1984.  More than that it cast a realistic perspective on British classism, racism and imperialism. We all need to learn from the past.