"Stein does well in putting a human face on some major current problems for patients and physicians" -Booklist
THE WHITE LIFE (Permanent Press, 1999)
On a spring day, a doctor whose aging father died when he was a young teenager decides to visit the doctor who cared for his father but lost him to congestive heart failure. For the previous few days, the young doctor has confronted many of his own demons as he treats cardiac patient George Dittus, not a mirror image of his father but close enough to bring out his own insecurities, especially when he mis-doses Dittus, who almost dies. What marks this novel is that Stein is a doctor as well as a novelist; his strength resides in the medical insights he brings to his writing, an existential drama with overtones of Camus though without that author's absurdism. The powerful, anguished, evocative prose of Stein's second novel is not to be missed; he brings to his fiction the vividness and immediacy of a memoirist. -Library Journal
Praise for THE WHITE LIFE
"Brilliant, lyrical, and daring." Annie Dillard
"A little jewel of a second novel." Publishers Weekly
"With resonant intelligence and the generous irony of Walker Percy or Milan Kundera, this local story about minor medical events enlarges, by virtue of the author's gift, to embrace and illuminate the perils, the abandonments, the dark joys, and the giddy celebrations of being human." New England Journal of Medicine
"THE WHITE LIFE offers the great privilege of viewing human events from a perspective of humor and irony, joy and sadness." The Roanoke Times
"An existential drama with overtones for Camus, the powerful, anguished, evocative prose is not to be missed." Library Journal
"A riveting novel, filled with rich details and perceptions. Written with the cool precision of a surgical blade and the unsentimental exposure of an X-ray, you will never be able to look at a doctor in quite the same way again." The Providence Journal.
