A book about a barber, but a med student advised me to read it as a kind of doctor book. Jayber narrates a half century of executives supplanting farmers, tractors displacing mules, backhoes replacing shovels, and a man who walks away into the woods. Not backwards, but into a better economy, of barter, care, and attention. An account of becoming the kind of person upon whom “a strange unforeseeing patient had come over… a patience until death.” Read at a slant and you can find a history of why physicians no longer practice in rural communities. A barber before his time shows the way.