A portrait of the great 12th century medical sage by one of our leading medical men of letters. Sherwin B. Nuland-best-selling author of How We Die-focuses his surgeon's eye and writer's pen on this greatest of rabbis, most intriguing of Jewish philosophers, and most honored of Jewish doctors. Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before there was a Renaissance- a great physician, a dazzling Torah scholar, a daring philosopher. Eight hundred years after his death, his notions about God, faith, the afterlife, and the Messiah still stir debate; his life as a physician still inspires; and the enigmas of his character still fascinate. Nuland's portrait of Maimonides that makes his life, his times, and his thought accessible to the general reader as they have never been before.