Publisher:New York : William Morrow and Company, 1968.
Edition:First Ballantine Books edition.
Copyright Date:©1968
Characteristics: 211 pages
Richard Hooker was the pseudonym for H. Richard Hornberger a surgeon, and MASH was based on his experiences during the Korean War.
For those readers who are familiar with the movie version of MASH it follows the book quite closely, which detailed the lives of a group of surgeons while they were posted in Korea for approximately 15 to 16 months.
The two main characters in the book are Hawkeye Pierce, and Duke Forest, both surgeons who arrived at the 4077 MASH at the same time. In the movie & series the lead characters are Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre. There are certain characters in the book though that do not play anywhere near as big a part as they did in the television series, such as Major Houlihan, Major Burns.
The book is very well written and gives a good account of what the surgeons and medical staff of a typical MASH unit went through on a daily basis. There's a fair amount of medical terminology which might confuse, or at least slow down the understanding of someone who isn't familiar with it.
There are a number of scenes in the book that appear in the movie, but do not appear in the TV series, such as the suicide of Painless Pole, The football game, and the trip to Japan to operate on the Congressmans son (and play golf). There is also a great section where Trapper John poses as Jesus Christ and sells autographed pictures of himself in order to raise money to send Ho-Jon to medical school in the States. This I'm sure would have been great had it been in the movie, but I'm also sure that the religious right would have had a rather large fit about it.
This book is a very good read, and I would recommend it as an interesting comparison to what you have seen or might see if you have never seen either the movie it the series.
