The Covid Chronicles and More

by David J. Holcombe MD

Overview

“The COVID CHRONICLES and More” is a collection on non-fiction articles related to the COVID pandemic, plus various short plays and other writings by Dr. David Holcombe. The COVID pandemic monopolized the nation and the world of public health for over two and a half years (from March 2020 to October 2022), resulted in over a million U.S. deaths. Following these published non-fiction articles gives a unique historical and scientific perspective on the events from a local public health perspective. The following plays deal with a variety of topics, including office dynamics, letter writing and teacher-student relationships in a French class. The collection ends with a few miscellaneous works, some of them more or less autobiographical. Given the diversity, there should be something for everyone ranging from the scientific to the theatrical.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665570824
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	11/07/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	322
File size:	709 KB

About the Author

David J. Holcombe was born in 1949 in San Francisco, California, and raised in the East Bay in Walnut Creek. He passed a tranquil youth and adolescence, riding to school on a bicycle through pear orchards that still lined the country roads. At Las Lomas High School, his English teacher introduced their Advanced English class to creative writing, something he pursued at U.C. Davis under the tutelage of Diane Murray-Johnson (author of “Le Divorce” and “Le Mariage.”) While always attracted to art, writing and dancing, the realities of life induced him to pursue a medical career, a path that lead him to the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, Belgium. His knowledge of four years of high school French allowed him to excel in medical school despite the rigor of a Belgian education. Returning to a residency at a Johns-Hopkins affiliated clinic in Baltimore, he and his wife and three sons made their way to Central Louisiana in 1986 where their fourth son was born. There, in the middle of the rural South, he practiced medicine for twenty years while raising a family and resuming both painting and creative writing. After twenty years of internal medicine, he pivoted to public health and became the Regional Administrator/Medical Director of the Louisiana Office of Public Health for Central Louisiana. During his years in Alexandria, Louisiana, he self-published twelve books (all of them commercial flops) and saw a dozen of his short plays produced by Spectral Sisters Productions, a local developmental theatre group. Science and art have co-existed uneasily during his entire life. He has been called too artsy to be a good doctor and too scientific to be a good artistic. Being torn between these two conflicted poles has provided much of the tension that fueled his artistic output. While his books remain unsold, his art has had some modest success in local-regional exhibits and has found its way into a number of collections, none of national renown. He hopes that his artistic output will be discovered by generations yet unborn as an expression of a creative spirit, stuck in a most unlikely environment. When he planned on moving from Baltimore in 1986, the Residency Director at the program learned of the proposed destination, Alexandria, Louisiana. He commented at the time that “you won’t find any soul brothers there.” Those prophet words have remained with me for over 40 years. With much effort, however, there have been some glimmers of “soul” in a number of my brothers and sisters of Central Louisiana, leading me to believe that you can find kindred spirits in even the most unlikely places.