The stories in this volume are short, tightly focused, and engaging.  Readers come to expect surprises both in patients who ask odd questions based on wild misinformation, in the curious expectations people bring to a doctor’s office, and in the doctor’s own candid admission of uncertainties, and his inventive approaches to negotiating with reluctant patients or colleagues. Some allow a view of the intimate life of a doctor who has his own encounters with personal and family illness and loss.  Watts’s candor might take some readers aback; it certainly forfeits professional self-protection in ways many in the profession would not.  It is a valuable, highly readable invitation to reconsider the “social contract” between doctor and patient, and a reminder to remember the physician’s humanity: acknowledging it in the way Watts does is far more likely to enhance trust than to diminish it.