Drs. Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin remove cataracts and restore sight to poor people in developing countries.

They helped a 40-year-old Nepalese woman with fully mature cataracts who tried to kill herself when blindness made her life unbearable. She could no longer work at the village loom; she could no longer walk the rocky path to the village water tap. “Life became very sour for me,” she said, telling her story after Dr. Ruit had removed her diseased lenses and inserted two intraocular lenses — permanent plastic lenses — into her eyes. In Nepal, as the two doctors gradually lowered the rate of blindness, they operated on members of the royal family, on a woman who had never seen three of her own children, on a 78-year-old shepherd who said, when his eye patch came off after surgery, “I’m not only seeing the sun, I feel I am the sun.”

Author David Oliver Relin tells the story of this medical miracle by recounting the life stories of the two doctors. Readers learn that Sanduk Ruit, pioneer of cataract surgery in the Himalayas, grew up poor in Nepal, studied in India, and decided to become a doctor because he watched three of his siblings die of easily treatable conditions.

American Geoffrey Tabin often abandoned his medical school classes to go mountain climbing. He “tended to dance along the border of socially unacceptable behavior,” Relin says, illustrating this tendency with Tabin’s recitation of an obscene poem for students who remained behind after he gave a medical school lecture. Not surprisingly, Ruit spent some time testing Tabin’s seriousness and commitment before shaking his hand to make him a full partner in their medical practice.

Readers familiar with the marvel of successful modern cataract surgery will want to learn how this kind of medical care works in poor communities far from hospitals. Relin impedes that learning by writing so many non-medical details about the doctors’ lives that the book’s medical thread becomes hard to follow. (He quotes all three verses of Tabin’s dirty poem.) Mentions of medical terms — for example, intracapsular surgery, extracapsular surgery, phacoemulsification — appear willy-nilly within the narrative of the doctors’ lives, requiring the reader to synthesize the medical material.

Similarly, the reader must piece together how Ruit and Tabin organize their work, using scattered descriptions of eye clinics, eye camps, hospitals, a lens factory, and the two doctors’ nonprofit organization, the Himalayan Cataract Project. Geography also confuses. The doctors are removing cataracts in Nepal. No, now they’re in Tibet. And now they’re in Bhutan. And now it’s hard to keep track as they move among Rwanda and Ethiopia and Ghana.

Still, Relin does make clear that the project expands geographically. Ruit and Tabin train more surgeons. Increasing numbers of Asians and Africans receive their sight. The two doctors go from strength to strength, Ruit never losing heart, Tabin gradually gaining self-discipline. Despite the story’s scattered threads, the reader has no trouble understanding that Drs. Ruit and Tabin perform good deeds for people who badly need their help. 

Some chapters in Second Suns show Relin accompanying Ruit and Tabin, living with them in remote villages, watching them operate, acquiring first-hand knowledge of their work. Nonetheless, as he writes in an author’s note, “much of this book must rely on the memories of two fifty-something men who have conducted hundreds of mobile surgical camps.” Accuracy was no small matter for Relin, who had endured accusations of inaccuracy and deception about his previous book, the bestseller Three Cups of Tea, written with Greg Mortenson. David Oliver Relin took his own life in November 2012, having completed Second Suns. He never mentions Three Cups of Tea in the author’s note, but he does write that he hired a professional fact-checker for Second Suns, had him interview many of the people who appear in the book and traveled with him to Nepal to clarify details of the story.

Relin first saw Sanduk Ruit remove a cataract in a Nepalese village operating room with bare light bulbs and an outdoor generator that powered two surgical microscopes. The operation, including the plastic lens insertion, took seven minutes. “Seven minutes to restore a man’s life,” Relin writes. “My spine tingled like it was connected to the generator.” Relin had thought his next book would be about a Sherpa mountain climber. Instead, he wrote Second Suns because he wanted the world to know how much he respected and admired the two doctors’ work. To Relin’s great credit, every chapter of Second Suns conveys the spine-tingling awe he felt at that first cataract operation.

Ann White is the retired chairwoman of the history department of Edmund Burke School in Washington, D.C. She holds a Ph.D. in Far Eastern history from the University of Pennsylvania. 

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