Just finished D-Day by Antony Beevor, another masterpiece of detailed history. I'm just stunned by the amount of research required and it will probably be the definitive account.

Still reading Sharpe's Gold, but also Melvyn Bragg's "The Adventure of English."

In 2005, the Sundance Channel aired Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, a 52 minute documentary that pays homage to the most famous independent bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company .Sylvia Beach first opened a bookshop with that name in 1918, and it soon became a home for artists of the "Lost Generation "(Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald, Stein, etc.) and also famously published James Joyce´s Ulysses in 1922. The shop eventually closed during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Yet a good decade later, an eccentric American named George Whitman established another English-language bookstore on the Left Bank and eventually rechristened it Shakespeare and Company. Whitmans shop gave sanctuary to Beat writers - Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and the rest. And it’s this incarnation of the fabled bookstore that the documentary takes as its subject. The video shows just the first nine minutes of the film, but you can see it in full here Give it a watch, and be sure to watch the last five minutes - unless you already know how to cut your hair with fire.

That is a very good book bjbdbest

As I progress reading, JP, I find myself deeper involved with the characters and intricate details of Verghese's style of writing.
An interesting sidebar is this quote from an interview in which he clarifies the title:

There is a line in the Hippocratic Oath that says: ‘I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest.’ It stems from the days when bladder stones were epidemic, a cause of great suffering, probably from bad water and who knows what else. […] There were itinerant stonecutters—lithologists—who could cut either into the bladder or the perineum and get the stone out, but because they cleaned the knife by wiping it on their blood-stiffened surgical aprons, patients usually died of infection the next day. Hence the proscription ‘Thou shall not cut for stone.’ […] It isn’t just that the main characters have the surname Stone; I was hoping the phrase would resonate for the reader just as it does for me, and that it would have several levels of meaning in the context of the narrative.