Summary:

This is Krysl's fifth book of poetry, and the second to be published by the National League for Nursing Press. The collection is divided into seven sections: Self Healer; Self and Nature; All My Relations; Healers; Calcutta; Sanctuary; and Death, Life. The sections, and, in fact, many of the poems, are preceded by brief introductory explanatory remarks.

Krysl states that "this book records many moments of healing in widely varying circumstances." These moments, for her, include a summer volunteering in the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying, administered by Mother Teresa's Sisters of Charity, and time spent with curanderas, Navajo healers, and "western" alternative healers. A sampling of poems from a number of the sections included in this collection are "Cancer Floor," "Curandera," "Innanna," and "Interpreter."

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A woman who works at a rehabilitation center for the blind reflects on the deaths of the people around her, clients as well as patients. She recounts the reaction of the staff to the death of a well-loved employee of the center whose name the narrator doesn't recognize. As she assists the blind clients at the funeral home, she suddenly realizes she did know the dead woman, but never had known her name. The narrator reflects on how a sight-impaired friend of hers, Vange, approaches life with supreme attentiveness, and never misses any details. The colleague's funeral reminds the narrator that living means being more like Vange.

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The threat of biotechnological warfare and/or terrorism is the focus of this carefully researched and riveting novel by the author of The Hot Zone. The term "science fiction" doesn't quite do justice to this tale which lies just to the other side of Preston's usual domain of literary nonfiction. Though the particulars of this story of a genetic engineer who designs lethal virus bombs to thin the population and the counterterrorist group of scientists who attempt to stop him are fictional, the possibilities of such threats are real.

The counterterrorists are a motley and sometimes contentious group of recruits from the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the U.S. military. Their agendas and methods differ, but the immediate death threat to the unsuspecting inhabitants of New York and Washington D.C. unifies them into an effective if not always efficient team. They discover the virus when five cases appear of what seems to be an acute and horrifying permutation of a rare neurological dysfunction that induces violent seizures and compulsive self-destruction by chewing on one's own flesh. The virus turns out to be a graft that could only have been produced by artificial means.

The search for the "mad scientist" with equipment capable of this sophisticated work takes weeks during which a handful of people have to live with the secret that a potential pandemic could literally explode in a local subway. The resolution, while in some ways satisfying, hardly dispels the uneasy implications which invite readers not only to serious reflection on our collective attitudes toward weapons research and development, but to activism.

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The narrator recalls a boyhood encounter with Rab, a majestic dog. Rab causes the lad to make friends with his master, James Noble, a simple horse-cart driver. Six years later, James brings his beautiful old wife, Ailie, to the hospital where the narrator is now a medical student. She has breast cancer and the surgeon tells her that it must be operated the following day. James and the dog are allowed to remain nearby.

Ailie endures the operation in brave silence, commanding silent respect from a lively group of students. James nurses her tenderly, but she develops a fever and dies a few days later. Shortly after her burial, he too falls ill and dies. Rab refuses to eat, becomes hostile, and is killed by the new driver.

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Summary:

Tuesdays with Morrie is a series of lessons a former (and now current) student has with his teacher (and now mentor) about facing one's death and living one's life. The author, Mitch Albom, is an award-winning sports columnist with the Detroit Free Press. A chance encounter propels Albom, guiltily and fearfully, to the bedside of Morrie Schwartz, his sociology teacher at Brandeis University nearly twenty years ago. [This chance encounter occurs electronically--Albom saw Morrie speaking about dying from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) with Ted Koppel on the Nightline television program].

Once together again, teacher and student decide to extend the visit over the remaining months of Morrie's life. Their Tuesday "seminars" explore perennial value issues of everyday life: "Family," "Emotions," "Money," "Marriage," "Our Culture," Fear of Aging," etc. The interchanges, fortunately, are studded with "pearls of wisdom" from Morrie.

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Canadian artist, Robert Pope (d.1992), devoted the last years of his short life to documenting his decade-long experience as a patient with Hodgkin's Disease. Shortly after his diagnosis he was influenced by the 1945 autobiographical novel of Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Pope's early work explored the interconnectedness and pain of individuals bound by an imperfect love, in Smart's case for a married man. After his disease went into remission, he began to paint the patient's perspective on illness, hospitals, visitors, family, and health-care providers in a series of images that suggest the lighting of de la Tour, the photographic immediacy of Doisneau, and the menacing surrealism of de Chirico. His book, Illness and Healing: Images of Cancer (1991), became a bestseller.

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This collection of poems is a sustained meditation on, and coming to terms with, grief. The speaker's mother has been killed suddenly in an automobile accident and most of the book's first poems deal with the aftermath of her death. For example, in "The Toll Attendant," the speaker describes asking directions to the hospital "where mother's body / may be retrieved at our earliest convenience."

In the title poem, the speaker asks, "And now that she's gone how do we find her-- / especially my small daughters who will eventually recall their grandmother / not as a snapshot in the faults of the mind/ but as the incense in their hair long after the reading of the Lotus Sutra." In thinking about her father's wish to bring back his wife from death, "to retrieve her–", the speaker asks, "what hell is this where each article emits the fragrance of mother's cold cream."

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The writer, a comparative literature professor, elected to spend one full semester as an up-close observer in a medical school anatomy lab during the student dissection experience. He approached the experiment with the clearly articulated intention of writing about the lab, the instructors, the students, and their subjects. The book takes the reader dissection by dissection through the socialization process, as well as the technical content, of the class--from the first cut to the final memorial services for the cadavers at the closure of the term.

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Mr. Sweet is a neighbor of the narrator, who is initially a little girl summoned with the rest of her siblings whenever Mr. Sweet is threatening to die. The narrator describes how she and her brothers loved Mr. Sweet, despite the fact that he was an indifferent cotton farmer, a frequent drunk, and an inveterate smoker. Somehow the faults of the old man, including his falling-down bouts of drunkenness and his slovenly personal appearance, are not impediments to the devotion he inspires or the affection for him on the part of the narrator and her brothers.

Each time the children are summoned, Mr. Sweet is reputed to be at death's door. "To hell with dying," the narrator's father would say. "These children want Mr. Sweet!" Then the youngsters would leap on the man in bed and begin their miraculous revival. By turns tickling and kissing Mr. Sweet, the neighbor kids manage to revive him time after time. The narrator comes to have faith in her unfailing ability to bring him back to life, and several times the children succeed when the local doctor had given up hope.

Nearly two decades pass, and the narrator is in graduate school when another summons comes. She flies back to the rural South and hastens to the bedside of the old man, now over ninety. But this time, after a brief return to consciousness, Mr. Sweet dies.

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A surgical intern has participated in 86 year old Mrs. Byrnes's abdominal surgery, where extensive metastases from ovarian cancer are found. The surgeons take biopsies, confirm the diagnosis, and close her abdomen, knowing that her case is not treatable. Later that day, it falls to the intern to inform Mrs. Byrne of what they found.

The author describes how he avoided the task, finding other chores to do, appealing to the attending physician to not make him talk to the patient. The attending insists, and the author finally finds the nerve to talk with his patient. Much to his surprise, she has already suspected that she has cancer, tells him not to be upset, and assures him he did his best. The author discovered that learning to be a doctor meant being open to learning from his patients.

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