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Knucklehead
Knucklehead is a life's story, an evolution of consciousness, a tale of self-actualization. The author experienced childhood in 50's mid-America, 60's anti-Vietnam War turmoil and cultural revolt and found his raison d'etre in the 70's. Beyond this the book details medical education and practice, family controversies, travels and triathlon competitions. After facing the grill of a speeding dump truck, this young man considered his failing choices and became a seeker of life's essence.
Reviews
The title of this thoughtful account of a life well lived comes from a resonant, relatable memory: young Sohn, his family first joker “in a generation or two in our family, since the Great Depression and World Wars didn't lend well to laughter,” being dispatched by his mother to “Go help your daddy” with his father’s endless succession of projects and chores around their St. Louis home. “His only interest in bonding involved glue or cement,” Sohn notes, and his efforts at aiding the taciturn veteran tended to result in discord (“You knucklehead!”). This primal scene hints at why young Sohn was freebooting and unambitious, skating through Mizzou “with unbridled enthusiasm for all sorts of tox.” A near-death experience at age 20 turned him around, and soon Sohn enlisted in the National Guard, working to become a geometry teacher and then eventually a doctor, all while backpacking, climbing, and pushing his limits as a triathlon athlete.

With insight and an eye for telling detail (playing in a bluegrass band; a performance as a singing telegram), Sohn recounts his adventures, career shifts, many homes, and establishment of his own family. His youth pulses with Boomer touchstones—parking on dates, “distrust of anyone over thirty,” 1970s hitchhiking, the father who declares, over shoulder-length hair, “Go get it cut or move out.” What startles, as Sohn, builds a life of purpose and consequence, is how his abbreviated period of wanderlust continues to haunt him, even as it has become a truism, in the U.S., that young men often take a few years to find a path.

Sohn shares hard-won insight into his times (hippies, he notes, were “people of all sorts with the same flaws shared by ‘straight’ society”) and choices, and later, the opioid crisis and challenges facing physicians, though the amiable telling lacks the narrative tension or momentum of top memoirs. Still, Sohn writes strong, incisive scenes, inspiring moments of self-discovery on mountain peaks and in life itself, and memorable portraits of patients, professors, friends, and more.

Takeaway: Thoughtful account of a shiftless Boomer kid finding himself and becoming a doctor.

Comparable Titles: Luissa Kiprono’s Push, The Breathe, Jim Merkel’s Growing Up in St. Louis.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B
Marketing copy: A-

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