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From Start to Finish is a series of five autobiographical vignettes of Dr. Brewer’s life. It’s a little different from typical autobiographies in that it doesn’t start in the beginning and chronologically and methodically tell the story of a life. Rather it is divided into five sections that, while they generally proceed in chronological order, are also divided by setting and topics. Thus, the first section, “Tales from Life on the Farm,” while providing information on his childhood, is dominated by his father’s Depression-spawned concept that his boys needed to learn to farm, liberally sprinkled with his other firm belief that by using a little ingenuity, he “could make a million dollars.” Readers should find this group of tales interesting and often humorous. Beyond this they will gain a snapshot of the “rural-poor” in post-Depression America. His father was an avid hunter and fisherman, and as a boy George joined in those activities with great enthusiasm. As with the farm tales, the second part of the book, “Tales from Woods and Waters,” gives a glimpse of something perhaps a little different, a boy’s view of hunting and fishing with his father. As George grew up, he retained an interest in fishing, and a little of that adult interest, with anecdotes mostly about fishing with his dad, are included. As George finished high school, he decided to go to college, even with very little financial resources, stimulated strongly by four older siblings who had gone to college, also in spite of few financial resources. “Tales from Schools and Hospitals,” the third part of the book, is a little about his decision to go to pharmacy school and a little about his college experiences. However, it is much more about his motivations to follow a career path in medicine, about his experiences in medical school, as well as in a residency in internal medicine. Readers will see medical school and medicine from a view they’re not used to, up close and personal, and always with an eye toward the humor in the situation. The fourth part is indeed unique. After residency in internal medicine, Dr. Brewer spent four years in the Stateville Penitentiary, a maximum security prison in Joliet, Illinois. Quickly, it should be said before the reader jumps to the conclusion that they’re reading the words of a convicted felon, that he was a scientist in charge of studies being done there by the University of Chicago, funded by the U.S. Army. The work there involved malaria research, and that work has been a key in the development of antimalarial drugs still used around the world. But what has been done in “Tales from Jail,” besides talk about some fascinating things related to malaria research, is to give the reader a peek inside a prison such as this, and a peek at the inmates who were the project’s nurses, technicians, clerks, and malaria subjects. Dr. Brewer felt he needed one more piece of “tooling” before settling down into the medical research career. He wanted to know more about human genetics. So off to the University of Michigan for a postdoctoral experience in that topic. Finally, all tooled up, he was ready for a real job, and accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan, where he has been ever since (35 years and counting!). “Tales from the Halls of Science” is the story of his academic medical research career, told in layman’s language. This section provides some perspective on what such a career is like, its up, its downs, the depressing disappointments, the highs of the occasional successes, and what it is that motivates most scientists to work so hard. His career is ending on a series of highs, so those readers who like happy endings should be satisfied. Some of the things a reader can take away from this book are as follows. First, that in this country a very impoverished but determined youngster c
