Bill Morgan had everything—or at least he did until, as chair of the board of Travis College of Medicine, he severed a seventy-year relationship between the College and its principle teaching hospital and touched off a blood feud between them. He and Dean Dan Maffit provoke a struggle with the hospital's board chair, Jimmie Rutherford, and its CEO and ex-Israeli operative, Sandy Wechsler, in which the two institutions vie for prestige and dominance and for the physicians who serve them. We follow Morgan's fate in the ensuing conflict as his ambitions bring him face to face with his inner demons and insecurities. In the wake of the turmoil the lives of physicians, administrators and board members spin out of control. This novel of medical politics asks us to consider how not-for-profit institutions make decisions and how these decisions unmoor people's lives in unpredictable ways and run the risk of violating the public trust.
About the Author :
MICHAEL LIBERMAN is a research physician and poet who lives in Houston with his wife Susan. He has published five collections of poems and won the 2011 PEN-Texas Award for Fiction. Never Surrender--Never Retreat is his first novel.
Review :
"The plot of Never Surrender--Never Retreat becomes a microcosm of our current worldwide struggle between free capitalism and socialist theology. Lieberman is writing from many years’ experience in the largest medical complex in the world, Houston’s Texas Medical Center. Through it all, the prose is crisp, germane, and readable. This is a haunting and memorable novel, a tour de force in the exploration of our modern dilemma."--Robert Winship, author of The Brushlanders, Flannery's Crossing, and Every Man Also
|“What Michael Lieberman does in Never Surrender, Never Retreat is a minor miracle. He takes a story that, on the surface, might seem bureaucratic at best—the “divorce” of a medical school and its affiliated major hospital—and reveals the intricate and human inner workings that are always at the core of such events. I feel I am in the company of a compassionate, witty writer who deliberately and carefully—scientifically, even—unveils for us the hubris, ambition, self-deception, foolishness, clarity, and even a little lust that drive this complex and evolving matter. I couldn’t put it down: the unfurling of incident through the shifting viewpoints of a motley and vivid cast of characters has the pacing of a fine mystery story. You know the murder takes place, almost from the first page. Now the question is: how and why did it happen? The answer, this book, is a delicious pleasure.”--Rich Levy Executive Director, Inprint, Houston
