Publisher's Synopsis
The first Americans to work with the people of the Middle East were neither spies nor soldiers. They were, in fact, teachers, printers, and missionaries, of whom one was a country doctor from Utica, New York. In June of 1835, Asahel Grant, M.D., and his bride Judith, sailed from Boston, to heal the sick and save the world. Their destination was the town of Urmia, in Northwest Iran, and their intended flock, the Nestorian Christians, who lived there, and in the mountains of Hakkari, across the border in Ottoman Kurdistan. Into the next eight years, Grant packed ten lifetimes' worth of danger, heartbreak, and exertion. He traversed deserts and glaciers, forded rivers, learned fluent Turkish and Syriac, opened schools, tended the sick and dying, confronted bandits, broke bread with thieves and murderers, and narrowly escaped death from drowning, malaria, cholera, influenza, mercury poisoning, dysentery, hypothermia, and assassination. In one year alone he lost three-fifths of his family (including Judith) to disease, was targeted for death by a mob, and nearly died by blizzard, drowning, and dysentery. Yet, by the time his shattered body gave out, there was no one in the mountains who did not know his name and his legend, and thirty years later, Kurds, Nestorians, Jews, and Yezidis still spoke of ""Hakim Grant"" with reverence. Grant was a walking contradiction: a saint who ruined his health with his own medicine, and an apolitical man whose very existence bristled with political import. In 1841, amid this whirlwind of a life, he became a best-selling author with his book ""The Nestorians: Or, The Lost Tribes"". Grant and three of his colleagues are buried in Mosul, where he died in 1844 at the age of 36.
