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Work Before Play

So: what do you get when an amazing, hilarious, brilliant, and deep-thinking person asks you to write their autobiography?

Work Before Play!

(See ghostwriting to read my philosophy on these truly extraordinary projects!)

From the back cover:

We are, to a certain extent, the emotional and psychological products of the generations before us.

To trace this history, though, is often extremely difficult–how many of us have the kind of memory required to explore such transformative events?

Dr. Barry Silverman’s vivid recollection of stories and memories portrays both the joys and sorrows that echo down the generations, and he is richer both for that knowledge and the ability to understand its impact on his life today.

Join Dr. Silverman as he paints the portrait of the events that have led up to, and include, his extraordinary 88 years.

From the front flap:

Dr. Barry Silverman, M.D.’s, story begins in the late 1800s with the arrival in America of his grandfather, tailor to King Carl, from Latvia. It continues through the Great Depression, with a heartbreaking choice made by his grandfather to give up two of his children, one of whom is Dr. Silverman’s father, because his wife said they “couldn’t afford both his children and hers,” and follows the rising fortunes of his immediate family, despite strong anti-Semitism in his hometown of Midland, Pennsylvania.

Told in intimate detail through stories of himself, relatives, and friends, through chain-driven tricycles and the dead bodies of his career as a forensic pathologist, Dr. Siverman’s life resonates with the hardship of the “other” coupled with the warmth of a man whose gruff exterior reveals a heart in love with the world he sees and the many people he’s known, now and in the past.

This book is not available for sale, as it is a personal, family story.