Alumni Notes - Paperback

by Andrew S. Levitas (Author)

This novel, set in the turbulent colleges and cities of the American northeast, tells the story of a love shaped, thwarted and reborn in the dying and regenerating society of the 1960s. It is April 1973. Paul Seitz (Nott College 68, Einstein College of Medicine 72) hasn t seen Alicia Acheson (Wellsmith 69) in the six long years since he helped her brother Dickie, Paul s Nott College roommate, to leave the country and escape the draft and a life he didn t want. Now they are thrown together as intern and senior medical student on the team responsible for the Medicine wards and Intensive Care Unit for a 24-hour shift at Morrisania Hospital in the South Bronx. The story alternates between the events of a busy night in the hospital and the events of their lives as undergraduates, medical students and participants in the Anti-War movement as they find and steal the time for the exploration of the events that brought them passionately together, the secrets, misunderstandings, and history on both sides that split them apart, that constitutes the true realization of their love. With its aspiring graduates, wise-cracking lovers, and crusading physicians, Andrew Levitas debut novel is a thought-provoking page-turner, a cross between a screwball comedy and a Bildungsroman. Levitas captures the excitement of a memorable seminar discussion with the same panache with which he paces a thrilling car chase. A book about learning to live well, to love wisely, and to do some good in this world against the odds, its subtitle could have been A Sentimental Education. --Paul Howe