Book Promo ~ Eddie’s Boy by Robert Schwab

 Chief Medical Officer Examines
Dichotomy of Doctors as Patients

A Timely Medical Fiction Story Amid a Global Pandemic

Dr. Robert Schwab, chief medical officer for a hospital in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex, announces the release of his third book, Eddie’s Boy (Paperback, $18.95), February 2021. The book tells the story of a physician who faces life after an accident that leaves him with debilitating injuries. In an instant, the doctor becomes the patient, and while the journey throughout Eddie’s Boy reflects on illness and suffering, the healing and love that transpires is a lesson for all.

In the time it takes him to drive through a stoplight at the Four Corners of Law, Dr. Landon Ratliff––distracted by the finest birthday present he’s ever received and won’t remember––has his midlife crisis delivered to him in an instant. When his father, with whom he has never been close, is diagnosed with a terminal condition, Landon goes home to be with family.

The reader is carried through Dr. Ratliff’s resulting journey of illness, injury, suffering, healing, love and redemption. His experiences take him to places he’s visited before, but never thought he’d be. In the midst of a global pandemic, the reader is reminded of themes and emotions that surfaced in 2020.

Written with ease and eloquence, Eddie’s Boy explores the things we take for granted, and the things we never knew we had. In the end, healing and love overcome suffering and loss, providing readers a hopeful final message as we begin a new year.

“Doctors identify themselves as healers. When a doctor becomes objectively sick, with COVID-19 or otherwise, they’re thrust into the role of patient. It’s a profound experience for which they’re incredibly ill-prepared,” says Schwab. “Just as Landon ultimately realizes in Eddie’s Boy, I hope readers walk away with the sense that you’re never truly alone in life––you need other people, no matter who you are.”

ABOUT ROBERT SCHWAB

Robert Schwab is a physician executive with an interest in the roles that stories play in illness and healing, and how the humanities can improve medical education. In addition to writing and speaking on these topics, he teaches an undergraduate seminar at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has published poems, stories and essays, and writes and performs songs about healthcare. His first novel, Holy Water, explored the impact of the French Quarter on a young physician’s professional development. Back Side of a Hurricane, his second novel, is about fathers and their children, and the wisdom of sitting still when chaos swirls around you. He lives in Dallas. Learn more at RobertSchwab.com  or on Facebook @RobertSchwabAuthor.

Amazon Review

“A poignant story of redemption that addresses

the depth of love and what it takes to make amends.

A sweet and hopeful novel that is beautifully written.”

-Lynne Hinton The Beekeeper’s Wife

 

Eddie’s Boy
Publisher: Warren Publishing, Inc.
Release Date: February 2, 2021
ISBN-10: 1735860018
ISBN-13: 978-1735860015

Available from AMAZON

Book Promo: The Home Stretch

Undercurrents of Mortality, Forgiveness
Buoy Compelling Coming of Age Story

by Wayne M Johnston

For Bill Smith, the end has always been in view. And perhaps, in some metaphysical way, his occasional confrontations with the inevitable end that awaits us all made Bill better equipped to emerge intact from each crisis. His life, in fact, has been a series of highly unlikely extensions. This is his story.

The Home Stretch, from award-winning author Wayne M. Johnston, features everyman Bill Smith (loosely based on Johnston himself), who, throughout his life, is confronted with extraordinary circumstances. His is a coming of age story in which the peace that allegedly comes with maturity is often shunted aside to make room for yet another crisis. It is also an uplifting story in its portrait of a man struggling to find personal integrity through challenging conditions.

From an early age, Bill grapples with depression. Raised in a religious cult, he cannot reconcile his own experience with the worldview of his parents, and although he’s bound to them by love and obligation, he rejects their beliefs. His father’s palpable disappointment in Bill leads him to contemplate suicide and to provoke his father into a confrontation with a surprising outcome that would redefine their relationship and alter the course of both of their lives.

Given to a physical, adventurous life, Bill becomes the chief engineer on a seagoing tugboat, and his tales of weathering gale-force winds and violent storms at sea provide metaphorical undercurrents for his fraught relationship with his father, his failed early marriage, his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s and his own battle with leukemia, which he is told will kill him. Just when Bill has come to believe he has put the worst of it to rest, he learns something more about his father that opens everything up again, except this time, Bill’s sister is the victim.

The Home Stretch is a poignant, ultimately inspiring coming of age story that weaves themes of mortality and forgiveness through life-defining moments of reckoning that many adults have to face head-on and learn to overcome.

Wayne M. Johnston taught English, Creative Writing and Publications at La Conner High School for 19 years. Prior to that, for 22 years he worked on tugboats, usually as chief engineer, towing freight barges between Canadian and West Coast American ports. In 2011, he won the Soundings Review First Publication Award for his essay, “Sailing,” and has published other essays locally. For his debut novel, North Fork, he drew from years of experience reading student journals to reproduce the way kids voice serious matters to a trusted adult. The Home Stretch is book two in a planned trilogy. North Fork was released in 2016 as a YA novel. The story is told through the voices of three 17-year-olds as journal entries for their English class. Bill Smith, the protagonist in The Home Stretch, is their English teacher, and The Home Stretch is his back story.

Johnston lives with his wife, Sally, on Fidalgo Island in Washington State where he is working on another book length project.

 

The Home Stretch
Publisher: Black Heron Press
ISBN-10: 1936364344
ISBN-13: 978-1936364343

Available from
Amazon.com
BN.com
Target.com
and anywhere books are sold