The Backyard Tribe
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
When Dr. Bud Payne agreed to sponsor a Maasai girl to be flown from a small village in Kenya to an American hospital for heart surgery, he had no idea that the girl's tribe would accompany her -- and expect him to house them all! Warriors carrying spears, wives with infants and a medicine man install themselves in the backyard of Dr. Payne's suburban home. The results are both harrowing and hilarious, in this warm-hearted book that shows how much two different cultures can learn from each other.
Learn more about the recent struggles of the Maasai people at the following link: www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_maasai/?fp
"Neil Shulman is part crusader, part comic, and 100 percent original. Backyard Tribe is another very funny story by the funniest doctor in America."
- Carl Hiaasen, bestselling author of Strip Tease
"Utterly charming."
- Betty Rollin, author of Last Wish and First, You Cry
"If Dr. Neil Shulman is as brilliant a doctor as he is an entertaining and exciting novelist, he must indeed have some very happy patients."
- Carl Reiner, author of All Kinds of Love
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this offbeat, zany story, Shulman, a Georgia physician who wrote and produced the film Doc Hollywood , draws on his own experience with Heart to Heart, a program he helped found to provide cardiac surgery in the U.S. for Third-World children. Multicultural understanding doesn't come easy to Bud Payne, an Atlanta doctor, when a Maasai girl from Kenya arrives for emergency heart surgery--accompanied by her entire tribe, who camp out in mud huts in the altruistic doctor's suburban backyard. Shulman's story works best when it plays off the incongruities and misunderstandings resulting from a clash between cultures: in Kenya, TV kiddie-show host Zach Tyler attempts to set up a ``global village'' but finds that the Maasai are more interested in using the video equipment and satellite hookup to watch Hitchcock's Psycho and broadcast their own slasher film. Once in Atlanta, a Maasai tribal healer puts a sexual hex on a hospital administrator and tribe members rustle a Georgia farmer's dairy cows, since ``God gave them all the cows on earth.'' But then, Westerners ``don't have all the answers either,'' as Dr. Payne ultimately learns in this sporadically moving tale.
