Dooley goes from a boy, adolescent, and bachelor who disregards rules and remains unaware of the sociopolitical forces shaping his character to a medical officer of the military acting as a political pawn and finally to a "Jungle Doctor" who seeks to transcend political agendas while bridging the older age of anticommunism with the newer age of the focus on the advance of communism in Vietnam starting with the Kennedy administration.

At the start of Fisher's historical narrative, Dooley appears as an adolescent who defies the rules of his Catholic high school yet manages to get away with his wrongdoings because of his likable personality.

Fisher presents Dooley as naive and unaware that he was being indoctrinated with Catholic values, and this aspect of his personality remains static throughout his college life.

Fisher points out that Dooley served as the "historical bridge" between the older era of McCarthyism and the newer age of Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy, and he uses two facts to support this claim.

Ultimately, Fisher presents a bildungsroman in real life: Thomas Dooley, a man who builds himself into a "Jungle Doctor of a New Age" from an "undisciplined Irish-American rake."

In fact, Fisher points out that Dooley's objective was to show the Laotians how good the Americans were in going to help improve their medical well-being.

Not only did Schweitzer not explicitly identify with the values of his German and French background, but he also expressed his dislike for Dooley's identification with American principles.

[4] Both establish clinics (Schweitzer in French equatorial Africa and Dooley in Laos), and Fisher shows both Schweitzer and Dooley as characteristic of the "planner" model of medical missionary work described in William Easterly's The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good[5] (unlike Leader Stirling,[6] who adopted more of the "searcher" perspective that Easterly describes[5]).

Also, Fisher mentions that both Schweitzer and Dooley were criticized for being so absorbed with self-marketing and public image that they were absent for long periods of time from where they were performing their medical missionary work.

While Fisher does not assess which of these two presentations is more valid, the latter portrayal of Dooley is consistent with the fact that medical missionary work has been seen as a heroic or redeeming endeavor.

[7] Fisher proposes that Dooley serves as a "historical bridge" between anticommunist McCarthyism and the focus on the advance of communism in Vietnam starting with the administration of John F. Kennedy.

[11] Dooley's obituary also describes him positively, namely as someone who "won world fame" tending to the medical needs of Laotians and the Vietnamese.

Toni Morrison's bestselling novel Song of Solomon provides an unfavorable view of Schweitzer, presenting him as someone who didn't care about Africans but who was "in a laboratory testing himself.

Kirkus Reviews magazine described the book as "an accomplished biography of an almost forgotten, but important, player in American Vietnam War policy-making in the 1950s," calling it "insightful and enlightening.

The reviewer said that Fisher "gives us, as his subtitle promises, many 'lives': a vain, arrogant, self-promoting, ambitious, manipulative storyteller who knew how to exaggerate, tell small fibs and big lies; but also a sensitive, generous, idealistic and compassionate doctor who put himself on the line, under difficult circumstances for the most needy of people.