A Surgeon's Odyssey, by Richard Moss. This is the engaging story of an ear-nose-throat doctor who, early in his career, decided to move to Asia to work among poor people. It's an inspiring, interesting tale, but that isn't what attracted me to the book. Rather, what I most appreciated about the book is that the author, a Jewish man, almost always seemed to be attentive to matters of religion and spirituality to which his odyssey exposed him. He started working in Thailand and began to learn about Buddhism in some detail, in part because as he launched this part of his life, he writes, "I was seeking something. I wanted to help the neglected and diseased. But I wanted something else. I wanted to understand healing, its essence, and embrace it as something sacred." Indeed, he discovered something about Buddhism that rang true about his Judaism: "It had persisted, like Judaism, through the continents and vagaries of history, through the quirks and antagonisms of human caprice and aggression, to this instant." As he moved around Asia, he also encountered Hinduism and Islam and had to figure out how to understand those faith traditions even when aspects of them seemed silly, arrogant or otherwise flawed to him. For instance, he discovered that the story told in the Hebrew Bible about God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is told in the Qur'an, only it's not Isaac but Ishmael whom Abraham is asked to sacrifice. So rooted in the Isaac story was the author that he wondered whether Islam, by telling the story about Ishmael and not Isaac, "could be taken seriously." In the end, Moss discovered the flaws in himself: "I performed surgery on others to heal and restore them but did not accept an internal surgery that would have elevated me. . .Yet it was still worth it. . .My own realization would continue."

Review by Bill Tammeus

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