Book Review

By Derryll White

Coben, Harlan (1991).  Miracle Cure.

I have been reading Harlan Coben for a long time. He is a good storyteller and a more than decent writer. ‘Miracle Cire’ goes back to his beginnings, the second novel that he published.

The book takes me back as well. It is about AIDS – Acquired Immune-Deficiency Syndrome.  When I was younger and drugs and sex were a part of everyday life, AIDS was everyone’s concern. From San Francisco to Toronto to Vancouver, everyone was aware of the potential for HIV.  And not all of my acquaintances survived.

Now AIDS is something that rarely touches my life.  So Coban has shocked me with ‘Miracle Cure’ and caused me to reflect on personal history, memory and social culture.  The author is very clear here, moreso than in some of his later work, on both religion and politics. Both equate with power in this novel.

Coben is forceful in demonstrating that at some level neither religion nor politics deals equitably with people – the masses – but instead become tools in service to ego.

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Excerpts from the novel:

SMOKING – “Cigarettes are murder weapons, plain and simple.  I feel no pity for smokers who give themselves lung cancer.  They don’t care if they make other people sick with second-hand smoke or even if they give their own children a deadly disease.  It boggles the mind how we put up with people who are so selfish and destructive.”

POLITICS – “So I don’t have to tell you that politics is a strange game.  The strangest.  Like it or not, a candidate must compromise to win elections.”

AIDS – “The AIDS virus seems to me to be the public’s ‘Disease of the Week’ or “Flavor of the Month.’  It’s the new ‘in” cause for everyone to rally around.  I am confident that the public’s interest will wane and tire soon and then they will have the ability to view the disease more rationally.”

RELIGION – People wanted to believe.  People needed something and he gave it to them.  We need food, we need air, we need recreation and entertainment, and we also need to believe in something.  The leftist liberals believed in their gods – secularism, academic, the media.

CLASS – He always got a kick out of the curtains pulled  between the classes, turning an airplane into a microcosm of modern society.  I paid less than you, ergo I am pond scum, not fit to look at you or breathe your air.

POLITICS – “ … our current president’s [George H.W. Bush] position on abortion.  He used to be pro-choice.  Now he has magically shifted to pro-life.  Do you honestly believe he had a change of heart?  Of course not.  He just accepted reality.  He knew that if he ran as a pro-choice candidate he would have never won the Republican nomination.  And its not just Republicans.  The Democrats do it too.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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