Talent and ambition are fine things, but when unforeseeable impediments repeatedly block their progress and threaten to stymie their fulfilment, desperate measures may be taken. In the case of Brian MacKinnon, the drive to gain a medical degree was implacably forestalled by a powerful and determined antagonist. Three years after being unjustly excluded from medical school, he tried again, by undertaking a science degree to regain his place. Again, his efforts were rewarded with the ruthless application of the most extreme prejudice against him.

In an excellent retelling of these events, MacKinnon also describes his eventual transformation to the fictitious Brandon Lee and his audacious return to his old school where, as a thirty-year-old pretending to be sixteen, he passes his Scottish Higher exams with straight A's and re-enters medical school.

The rest is an unravelling, after his identity is discovered, and an unmasking of the dark forces that can be brought to bear when the individual dares to challenge the received will of certain establishment figures. It is a story that could well have been made a novel, but it is true and is just as absorbing as a novel can be.