Ocean State Libraries

"Jan Mikolasek, a 20th century Czech herbal healer won fame and fortune treating celebrities of the interwar, Nazi, and Communist eras with his uncanny knack for 'urinary diagnosis'. But his passion for healing welled up from the same source as a lust for cruelty, sadism, and an incapacity for love that only one person could ever quell, his assistant, Frantisek. As a show trial threatens to pry open these secrets and undo him, Jan's dichotomies are...

"An aging Jewish doctor is forbidden to practice medicine in Prague during the Nazi occupation. He is employed in a warehouse as a clerk, cataloguing confiscated Jewish property. When a partisan is wounded, the doctor reluctantly agrees to treat him. The doctor hides him in his run-down apartment building as he sneaks through the black-market underworld of Prague in search of morphine to ease the man's pain, ever fearful of informant neighbors and...