An Unfinished Product
By
Leonard Zwelling
Many years ago, my father self-published a paperback book that he wrote about his life that focused on his early years and the lives of those in our family who first came to the United States from Europe in the early 20th century. He called it To My Continuum: A Portrait. All of us in his family found it fascinating and a very worthwhile endeavor on his part.
My older son Richard was particularly taken with the book. He also has been particularly diligent in pursuit of our family’s history. He visited Zanesville, Ohio where my father was born and explored the cemetery where my father’s family lies. He even named his first-born son David, the same name as Richard’s great-great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather.
Richard suggested that I too needed to write a book like my father’s to document where I came from for all of us have such a story. The difference for me was that I had my father’s book as guidance and his 8 mm home movies (now transferred to DVD) to help my memory.
Using the magic of AI in the “person” of Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, I was able to publish the book on my own as I recently described in a blog called “AI for Dummies.” It is now available as an e-book or paperback on Amazon at the link below.
I am not at all sure how useful this will be to anyone outside my family even though so many people helped me along the way for the past 77 years and I try to give every one of them a shout out in the book. That’s right. I name names for the simple reason that I try not to say anything bad about anyone in the book. That in no way should be interpreted as meaning I had no enemies or disputes along the way. I had many. I no longer think those enemies or disputes should define my life, even though they once did. I saw no reason to dwell on these negative encounters in this book.
The book focuses on my life before I entered my career in academic medicine although I add a bit of that at the end mostly because there are good stories to be told that have not made it into my other books.
There were also significant medical challenges and truly low career points. I know there are people who claim to never having been fired or even doing a poor job at work. That’s not me. I have been fired a fair amount as I delineate in a past blog and I surely messed up leading a critical Student Union committee as a Duke undergraduate.
Even now, I am still hoping to contribute to society in some way. I no longer have a real job and haven’t for many years. Obviously, I write a great deal with this blog posting three times a week and several books that I have self-published (see my web sites; this one at lenzwelling.com and my new one zwelling-ehrllich-productions.com.) I am still looking for a traditional publisher or someone from Hollywood to read my novels, but I doubt this will occur. Publishing professionally is like any other job and requires great effort that I really no longer wish to exert at my age. I’ll save my energy for writing, not marketing. I am really done selling myself. I did that for 50 years. That’s enough.
So, if you are curious how a fat Jewish kid from the south shore of Long Island carved out a career in academic medicine doing clinical care, basic research, and administration, take a look. It’s my story. It starts with my procreation, for I know exactly when I was conceived, and I am in no rush for the last chapter.
My life began like most everyone else’s. It will end that way, too. This is what happened in the beginning of the in between. Enjoy.
