He served in the Army during World War II, but the war ended before he was scheduled to be shipped to the Pacific.

11, 1926, in Worcester, Mass., to Robert Gordon, a pawnbroker who had immigrated from Russia, and Rose (Melnikoff) Gordon, a sales representative. Gordon “throws in all the twists and turns readers expect in a historical drama, but he takes the corners with a measured sense of pace and irony.” It was a best seller only in Europe, however. Peter Blauner praised it in The New York Times Book Review, writing that Mr. Gordon's “Shaman” won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians as the best historical novel of 19. Since Christians were barred from Islamic schools, Cole disguises himself as a Jew. The novel, based on meticulous research, follows the odyssey of an 11th-century Scottish protagonist, Robert Jeremy Cole, who wants to study medicine in the Middle East, where medical schools were reputed to be more advanced than those in Western Europe. An award-winning musical based on the book is about to tour Spain. In 2013, “The Physician” was adapted into a German film, in English, starring Tom Payne, Stellan Skarsgard and Ben Kingsley. Gordon’s novels were on best-seller lists simultaneously.

Gordon’s “The Physician” (1986) - the first book in a dynastic trilogy that began in 11th-century Persia, continued during the American Civil War with “Shaman” (1992) and ended with a modern woman doctor dealing with the morality of abortion in “Matters of Choice” (1996) - had an initial print run of only 10,000 copies in the United States.īut it eventually sold some 10 million copies, including more than six million in Germany, where, in the 1990s, six of Mr. Gordon’s debut novel, “The Rabbi” (1965), spent more than two months on The New York Times’s best-seller list.

The physician de noah gordon