Obviously, when everybody knows the story already, there is a lot of pressure on the author when writing something like this. I had some difficulty not imagining Val Kilmer speaking all of JHH's dialogue, and at times the story seemed to be more a detailed account of the course of tuberculosis than it needed to be. I'm sure the author was not attempting a hagiography, but the overall structure of the novel naturally requires that the protagonist and his friends be cast in a positive light - making it somewhat difficult to see the characters as real people. I was pleased to see reference to "Rokitansky's hemorrhage". I still don't know what that is, even after searching Rokitansky's manual of pathological anatomy (at chestofbooks.com), but I can guess.