This book is an account of Professor Ezra Griffith’s friendship with Professor Chester (Chet) Pierce, who was professor of psychiatry at Harvard and a brilliant polymath. Pierce deserves to be much better known, and this is now possible because Professor Griffith has written a wonderful book about him. He and Pierce were friends for years, meeting regularly for lunch, and Professor Griffith has collated his memories of many wide-ranging discussions and conversations in this book, which he describes rightly as a ‘dialogue’.

Reading this book reminded me of a recent experience, when I heard a distinguished Indian clinician and academic talk about his experience of coming to England to train. The list of his accomplishments was vast, and he talked with pleasure and pride about many of them. But he also recalled how, after he had been appointed to a prestigious post, a colleague had come up to him and said, ‘Now we must help you to speak better English.’ Professor Pierce would have called that colleague’s comment a ‘micro aggression’; in fact, it was he who first coined the term in the 1970s. He referred to racism as a ‘public health pollutant’, which was destructive at both the level of the individual and the community. He was a researcher into human behaviour in environments that were socially extreme, whether because of the temperature and the terrain (as at the South Pole, where there is a mountain named after him) or racial inequity and humiliation, as he had seen in in many US cities and even on the hallowed ground of Harvard University, where he was a full professor in three faculties. There are not many professors of psychiatry who have been to the South Pole, studied psychosis in elephants and advised Sesame Street on children’s literature.

Professor Griffith is a polymath himself. A professor of forensic psychiatry at Yale, he has been studying narratives in the forensic context for decades, linking narratives of culture and identity to criminal processes and expert evidence. What makes his book about Chet Pierce especially interesting is that he weaves Pierce’s story with his own of coming to the USA from Barbados and with their mutual reflections on race and racism, so it really reads as a dialogue. The reader then comes away with the sense of having got to know not just one but two great men, who have given so much to their fields. As psychiatrists, we all need heroes to inspire us; here is the story of two such heroes.