A moving novel about the devotions of friendship and the power of love to heal, American Sycamore celebrates the American experiment and the importance of giving a damn. Friends for most of their lives, Rob, Julia, and Ray are boomers who set out in their twenties to make things right in America. A couple since law school, Rob is a distinguished Constitutional scholar at Harvard and Julia a prominent journalist writing a book about the wreckage of the nation's political life, while Ray serves as dean of the medical school. Ray's work as a physician in a Vietnam combat zone left him scarred yet with a powerful and loving commitment to heal and to support his friends through tragedy. Together, they've accomplished things that matter--in the public square and in medicine. Yet, in contemporary America, they still have some hard lessons to learn. After the New York Times publication of the 1619 Project, Rob finds himself out of step with critics and his students, but his and Julia's secure world is truly shaken by a diagnosis of prostate cancer that will require medical intervention--releasing memories of another time when their lives were turned upside down. Meanwhile, when Ray learns that the hospital and school he has devoted his life to may have betrayed patients and the medical community, he must choose whether to take up again a fight he has waged all his life against the worst impulses of big institutions.
A moving novel about the devotions of friendship and the power of love to heal, American Sycamore celebrates the American experiment and the importance of giving a damn. Rob Barrow's devotion to the American experiment has never wavered. For forty years he has devoted his legal brilliance to advancing the essential American ideals enshrined by the Founders. Rob is the best kind of throwback--a classic American character, reserved and respectful, yet with a fierce determination to protect the people and ideas that matter most. Rob stands his ground. He does not yield to the ridicule of malign political forces, nor to the mounting challenges of aging--loss, grief, even an invasion of rogue cells. While AMERICAN SYCAMORE is Rob's story, it is also the story of his beloved wife Julia, an author who believes America has lost her way and seeks to understand why. It is the story of their dearest friend, Dr. Ray Witter, a battlefield surgeon in Vietnam and now the medical school dean. When we first meet Rob, Julia, and Ray in graduate school during the 1970