Book Review: Cloud Messenger

Cloud Messenger

This was a wonderful read. Hers is an amazing story. It is well-written, filled with joy, as well as sadness, conflict, as well as beauty, suspense, as well as beautiful people.

In this poignant, heartwarming, and gently humorous memoir, Karen recounts an eleven-year chapter of their unusual lives. She and Pradeep worked as medical doctors in the Himalayas, first in a rural hospital and later in remote mountain villages. When disaster struck — an assassination, an earthquake, a political crisis — their ideals, their safety, and their relationship are put at risk.

After returning to Canada in 1996, Dr. Trollope-Kumar completed a PhD in medical anthropology, the study of health in its social and environmental context. She has been actively involved in medical education, developing curriculum that blends medicine and anthropology. In 2008, she was appointed Co-Director of the Professional Competencies program in the medical school at McMaster, a position she held for six years that develops students’ competence in the “soft skills” of medical practice, such as communication skills, ethics, and professionalism.

She currently works as a family physician, and she and Pradeep spend part of every year in Dehradun, India, where they lived and worked early in their married life.

Dr. Karen Trollope-Kumar studied medicine at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. In her fourth year of medical studies she met her future husband, Pradeep, on a student visit to Lucknow. After graduation, she worked as a family physician in Thunder Bay before moving to India to marry the man she loved.

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@Barrie Summy