Loving Touches - Hardcover

Hellerstein, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395404584 ISBN 13: 9780395404584

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987

Synopsis

The all-but-assured success of Pete Roth--a Harvard graduate, first-year resident at a distinguished New York psychiatric hospital, and husband to a beautiful, ambitious lawyer--is jeopardized when the intoxicating Celine Walter re-enters his life as a patient

About this title

About the Author:

David Hellerstein is a physician and author in New York. His other books include: A Family of Doctors (memoir of the history of medicine as seen through five generations of one family); and Battles of Life and Death (essays about medical school and residency training). His writing has appeared in NY Times Magazine, Harper's, Esquire, Fiction, and The North American Review. His writing has been praised by Tobias Wolff, Richard Selzer, and Sherwin Nuland.

From Publishers Weekly:

Pete Roth is the star psychiatric resident at Curtiss Psychiatric Institute on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He and his wife Sarah, an associate at an important midtown law firm, met and married when both were students at Harvard. Yuppies and then some, they're attractive, hardworking and clearly on the fast track. Then Celine comes onto Pete's floor at Curtisslovely, fragile-seeming, suicidal Celine, with whom Pete had a brief, significant affair during the summer his and Sarah's careers had kept them apart. When Celine is assigned to the resident with the shakiest reputation, Pete finds he can't maintain his professional distance. He becomes obsessed with her progress, gets involved in her treatment, grows apart from Sarah and even questions his commitment to his profession. In the course of these events, which include a frantic effort to save Celine after another suicide attempt, Pete faces his own selfish needs, observing his use of power over others and questioning the range of his control (shaking his yuppie values to their foundation). Conveyed with humor and sympathy, especially for Peter, this first novel by a psychiatrist-writer, whose previous book was the nonfiction Battles of Life and Death, is a nicely rounded story (even with its inconclusive ending) about people struggling with love and control. Its details of the back-room goings on at the fictional institute lend a refreshingly down-to-earth air to the often rarefied atmosphere on the far side of the couch.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0395404584
• ISBN 13: 9780395404584
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 233