Don’t take it personally, but I hate the dentist.Dr. Carroll James has heard this uncomplimentary ad...
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Don’t take it personally, but I hate the dentist.Dr. Carroll James has heard this uncomplimentary admission many times over his career. While trying to shrug it off, he can’t examine patients without noting their unique, often humorous personalities.To Tell the Tooth highlights Dr. James’s thirty years of practice. Over the years, an employee accidently sets his office on fire while another can’t master the phone’s hold button, routinely cutting off the person on the other line. Headphone-clad patients bop rhythmically to the music while he tries to steady the high-speed dental drill. He’s gotten very quick about removing his fingers from the mouth before getting bitten. Throughout it all, Carroll maintains his professional decorum—most of the time—which isn’t easy when a patient cheerfully drops her pants to show off the latest surgical scar on her butt. Touching, hilarious, and sometimes irreverent, Dr. James’s memoir reads like All Creatures Great and Small, if James Herriot worked with crowns and fillings instead of cows and sheep.
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