The Last Angry Man, a novel

The last angry man No one's perfect. They all have their share of bad and good, and this novel shows just that. The doctor could have not been better had he been different, and neither did Max Vogel or any one else. This book depicts character, and nature of people truthfully. You can just not blame anyone. It never gets over, and you can never ask for a relief. In your face, and no mercy for the reader. No idealizing, and no perfection. Perhaps that's why the book has been out of print forever.

Like da Vinci pencil-sketching a future masterpiece, Gerald Green used "The Last Angry Man" as a sort of scratch pad for "To Brooklyn with Love," a small but wonderful novel he would write a decade later. This earlier work is a character study-and a fine one-rich with textured detail and the colorful language of first-generation Americans and the other survivors of hardscrabble life in the postwar ghetto. Dr. Sam Abelman, who will reappear in the later book with little changed but his name, is angry. He rants about disease, poverty, intolerance and the absence of ambition; he resents the specialists who steal his two-dollar patients, and the patients who are too cheap to pay. He is a frontier physician with a heart of gold, a lovable curmudgeon who might be an angel with a better attitude and fewer Yiddish curses. The plot isn't uniformly gripping. There is a particularly arid stretch in the third quarter. But this portrait of the gritty Brownsville section of Brooklyn and its inhabitants is infectious and real, and Green's generous prose takes us to a faraway time and place and culture as effectively as any time machine ever might. The trip is worth it.

Green's work is especially relevant in today's culture where our leadership doesn't seem to have any moral or social backbone. The Last Angry Man portrays a truely noble doctor's attempt to reclaim such morality, by oddly caring about the consequences of his actions and the reality of his situation. Being the older and poorer practictioner, loosing patients to yuppie specialists and a neighborhood that is falling apart. Life's difficulties are explored and his undying anger prooves there are still some of us that care.