The Life List of Adrian Mandrick by Chris White

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The Life List of Adrian Mandrick 
Chris White 
Hardbound, 274 pages
 
 
This book is a novel but it feels like it's a biography or something. This tells about the psychological life of Doc Mandrick, an anesthesiologist, who avoids pain, physical and otherwise. He is also a record-holder birder, thus the title. He is juggling his marriage and family life, professional life, the darker side of life that is his drug addiction and a revelation by his father when he was a teen, a birder who had 800 plus sightings and held the third spot among the elite birders.
 
It is almost all throughout a soliloquy about his struggles. I have not made a research if the regulated/prescription drugs he used were really be taken but then could really mask his addiction or make him functional. Despite that, you will love him a bit for his determination to be a good father and husband.
 
His birding is part of his life, an interest he took after his mother whom he hated all through and through. And why? That is where the mystery lingers all throughout the book.          
 
The symphony of redeeming words is found just before the epilogue. It is where all that is contained in the first paragraph of this blog beautifully and meaningfully converge.
 
"xxx Those birds are all gone," his eyes suddenly brimming. "Every single one of them." 
He hasn't cried since Michaela was born.
"They're so much more fragile than anybody thought," he says. "The birds. You think, because they can fly, they can do anything, survive anything." 
 
 The twin life list of Adrian Mandrick is in there.

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