conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled First, Do No Harm about Central, Valley, Vietnam with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, moved to Queens, and then, as New Yorkers say, we ascended to the Island. After graduating from Valley Stream Central High School, I went to Adelphi, a college then, a university now, and then to medical school in Chicago. The war in Vietnam interrupted my postgraduate training with a year in Colorado Springs and another as a Battalion Surgeon in Vietnam. I spent seven months in the Central Highlands with the 4th Infantry and five months in an evacuation hospital in Long Binh outside Saigon where I ran the emergency room. I returned intact in 1968 to complete my training in internal medicine and diseases of the kidney, nephrology. I worked for twenty-three years in Berkeley, California in a hospital-based practice caring for patients with complicated illnesses often in ICU and served as Chief of Medicine. My wife Dorlis and I retired in October 1995 and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge for a life at sea in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Four years later, exhausted from repairing everything on board, (often many times) we sold the sailboat and within a year took the lazy mans out; we bought a Nordic Tug, a trawler. We motored around Florida, the Bahamas, the entire East Coast and completed two Circle trips to Canada and back, eight months, the first time, five months, the second. I wrote professionally as a physician to inform but rarely to entertain, at least not on purpose. The original First, Do No Harm was published in April 2007. I have written 13 novels. See all on my website: http://www.lawrencewgoldmd.com In the last two years, Ive written three screenplays based on my novels and hope to see one or more produced for the screen. I submitted my screenplay, Rage to the 80th Annual Writers Digest contest and won honorable mention (57 out of 11,000). We live in beautiful Grass Valley with 1 year old MikeWesley, a terrier mix and Bennie, a 11 year old purebred Yorkie who, looks like hes on steroids.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.. End with the sentence ' "Hell'd he die from?"'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: First, Do No Harm
  Never in my life had I heard anyone speak to my father in anything like those words and that tone. And "Sammy"? I'd never heard anyone even call him Sam, not his friends, not my mother. But he didn't seem to notice, just said lightly, "How're you doing, Oscar?"
  By the time I realized he was talking to me, Samuel said, "I've just come from Murray's, Os. Sorry, but I've got bad news for you."
  A laugh, more disparaging than the last. Oscar turned around, then waddled back inside the house. Samuel followed. I kept at a safe distance behind him.
  When we reached the living room, Oscar stopped, shoved his cigar back into the corner of his mouth, looked both of us up and down. The room was a pigsty. Few lumpy chairs, a sofa with springs protruding through the seat. All over, dust. Papers and odd chunks of metal here, there, everywhere. A half-eaten plate of food sat on a battered three-legged table to my left. Oscar shot a stream of brown saliva, ping, into a grimy steel spittoon. "Jonas, Christ! Thank God it was him, not Murray." He peered at Samuel, trying to make contact beneath the brim of my father's Panama, which he hadn't removed. "Hell'd he die from?"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Murray laughed. "He's got his ways, is all. I figure with what he's doing for us, I like him just fine." Murray put a hand to my shoulder. "Okay, come on, Dockie, deal's a deal. Get ourselves another Pepsi, then I'll show you how to put that music box back together." Another poke in the ribs. "Girls don't wait around forever for a guy."
  We went out back, pulled the tarp off the table. Murray studied the array of shiny brass and steel, belched absentmindedly, then pointed with the Pepsi bottle. "First off, we gotta put all them little pieces into their right groups. Spring-barrel parts, governor, cylinder, comb. Four piles. Like we just did with the metal out there."
  I must've been concentrating hard on making big pieces out of little ones because when Oscar barked, "Somethin' I want to tell you," I shot to my feet, scattered music box parts all over the table. Oscar snickered. "Oh, dearie me." Gruff falsetto. "Did I frighten Little Miss Pussy? Make her drop her pretty music box?"
  Blood zipped straight through my cheeks into my brain. "You want to tell me something, you can call me by my name," I snapped. "Leo."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. End with the sentence '
  To receive a free catalog of Poisoned Pen Press titles, please contact us in one of the following ways:'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She studied the picture, then me, back to the photo, back to me. Her hand crept up, covered her mouth. "My God," a whisper. "Except for the hair—"
  Against my will, I saw my sixteen-year-old father, sitting in the kitchen with Samuel, storm about to break, Samuel's face aglow. "Yes," Samuel said. "Yes. I love it."
  After I got Helene cooled off and under the covers, I put our uneaten dinner into the fridge, dragged myself into the living room, flopped on my back on the couch. That was hours ago. I doze, come around, doze again. A Mobius-strip movie runs on the ceiling above my head, story without end. There's my young father, Murray Fleischmann, Lily. Oscar, George, Harmony. Ramona and Samuel...or is that me? I snap awake, pull the photo from my pocket, play stare-down with my grinning mirror-image. Don't ask who blinks.
  I stretch, swing my feet to the floor, take Harmony's death certificate from my pocket, tear the paper into tiny bits, watch them flutter into the wastebasket next to the couch. Then I pull out my grandfather's certificate, and tuck it with his photo between the back of Dad's painting and the wooden stretcher-frame. Carefully, quietly, I hang the painting on the front wall of the living room, eye-level, where I can't help but see it every time I reach for the doorknob. "He knew what to do for everybody in Hobart—how could he not know for himself?" Good question. Goddamned good question.
  To receive a free catalog of Poisoned Pen Press titles, please contact us in one of the following ways: