I (and many others) loved James McManus’s last book, “Positively Fifth Street,” which told the story of how he went to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper’s and ended up sitting at the Texas Hold ‘Em final table with a pile of chips and a shot at the bracelet. His confessional mode suited the subject, and he’s a bit of a tough guy – not a fighter or a rogue, but in the lit game these days, “tough” translates into simply having the guts to appreciate that some women are hotter than others. Poker, drinking, hell, there was even a murder in “Positively Fifth Street,” and it was named one tick away from a Dylan song: Good stuff.

So upon hearing of his new project, I must admit I felt ambivalent. In “Physical,” Mr. McManus goes to the doctor.

Huh.

The details of other people’s doctor visits are about as interesting as the details of other people’s dreams, unless you have something invested in the information. If they dreamed of making love to you, that’s interesting. If the doctor’s appointment is the one at which your wife learned the first tests misfired, and that she doesn’t have whatever it is they said she might have, that’s very interesting. If it’s just Jim McManus, telling you what his cholesterol levels are, well, who cares?

The unpleasantness of such experiences is outdone only by their crushing banality. “A catalog of crappy events known to and shared by all” is not a blurb that gets the heart pounding.

This initial fear set off a veritable flood of panic, when I realized that we are standing at the spring, the watershed, of a mighty river. Baby boomers are getting old, after all, and have been immensely self-regarding so far. I imagined waves of doctor appointment books stretching out ahead of us, everybody kvetching about their aches and pains and talking about how the doctor grabbed their scrotum and or stuck his finger somewhere.

By page 100, I still had yet to be convinced.

In the meantime, Beatrice underwent a successful adenoidectomy to help her breathe easier at night, and her Mom finally got over a one-two punch of sinus infections. Antibiotics killed the first one, we thought, but it roared back three times as fierce a week later. This time, Dr. Martin put Jennifer on Cipro, which cured the sinusitis and made her temporarily safe from an anthrax attack.

What was I, an uncle? Why was I getting these e-mails about his daughters? But as the story goes on, the “why” becomes clear.

Throughout, “Physical” is intensely personal. Mr. McManus and his wife Jennifer thought they couldn’t have children when they got married, we learn, because “she’d lost her right ovary to a dermoid cyst five years earlier. (The size of a grapefruit, with teeth, hair, and cartilage, it was probably a malformed twin that developed inside Jennifer instead of her mother – instead of a sister, a cyst.)”

Mr. McManus’s son from his first marriage, James, died of a drug overdose while under observation at a mental health clinic. We also get to watch him shoot “five of six threes and a breakaway layup after a steal” playing six minutes in one quarter. Mr. M-Manus’s daughter from his first marriage has suffered from juvenile diabetes since she was 4. McManus shares their unspoken fear that she’ll die be fore the cure comes.

This isn’t a book about Jim’s doctor appointment, I realize. Jim is just a slightly self-destructive guy, like most of us. He smokes a Parliament every once in a while, and drinks a little too much wine with his big helpings of his wife’s good cooking. Of course, he’s made to feel like he’s topping himself, because he’s at the Mayo Clinic, for crying out loud. But he’s not the point. Jim is a foil.

This becomes more clear as we’re with the family speeding to the hospital after some spastic kid jammed Jim’s young daughter in the eye with a toy wand. Two prongs of metal punctured her eyeball. They are speeding in a car, barely catching a pediatric ophthalmologist before he clocks out for the weekend, putting their faith in the only place it can go at such a time: doctors. They are praying for science to save the young girl’s eye.

And by this time, I’ve gotten so many e-mails about their adenoids I’ve actually come to feel avuncular. My prayers are with them. I hope science will save her. It’s a great trick: By the time you realize what’s going on in this book, you’re practically a member of the family.

Mr. McManus’s point is to personalize the political. He decries President Bush’s ban on embryonic stem-cell research, which could help cure “diabetes, Parkinson’s, cancer, MS, and a dozen other vicious diseases.” Mr. Mc-Manus’s book is concerned not with one baby boomer’s trip to the doctor, but rather with the cost of failing to separate the secular and the sacred.

Once stem cells are curing Brigit’s diabetes, it’s harder to imagine curtailing the research. When Beatrice is crying because her eye has been punctured, our faith goes to medicine.

Mr. Watman’s “Race Day” (Ivan R. Dee) makes an excellent Chanukah present.