Summary:

Thirteen-year-old Jessie Keyser likes to accompany her mother, a midwife, to homes where there are births or illnesses. Her father is a blacksmith. She and her five siblings live in a log cabin in a small village. They believe the year is 1840. What Jessie doesn't know is that she lives in a replica of a 19th-century village and that the year is actually 1996.

When local children begin to fall ill of diphtheria, Jessie's mother takes her into the woods, provides her with food, blue jeans and a T-shirt, instructions on how to use a telephone, and amazing stories of the world outside that she and Jessie's father left when they joined the experimental colony. Jessie learns that tourists view them at their daily activities through hidden cameras. Now she is to escape and get needed medicine.

Armed guards surround the village. Safely outside the gates, Jessie wanders disoriented in 1996, looking for someone safe to ask for help. She finally talks to reporters who broadcast the news and send help immediately to the town. Medicines are brought and some children saved, though diphtheria has taken several lives. Jessie enters the present with some ambivalence, realizing there are large tradeoffs to leaving the simplicity of the past.

View full annotation

Summary:

The narrator in each of the stories in this unusual collection is a home-care worker who helps people with AIDS. Each story focuses on a "gift," i.e. "The Gift of Sweat"; "The Gift of Tears"; "The Gift of Mobility" and so on. In each, we see scenes in the weeks or months shared by caregiver and patient. The patients vary widely in age, life situation, stage of illness, and attitude toward both the illness and the caregiver.

The caregiver/narrator also changes somewhat from one story to another, giving the reader some sense of the different stresses and rewards that come in the course of such work. The details of caregiving are elaborated in ways that are sometimes mundane, sometimes surprising, sometimes funny, sometimes harsh, often touching, and always straightforward.

View full annotation

Summary:

This three-part collection of poems offers powerful images and vignettes from the life of a family practitioner living and working among the urban poor. The first section is the most explicitly medical in theme, including poems that pay painful tribute to a mother after stillbirth, a hydrocephalic child, an addict covered with boils, a young man murdered at eighteen, an old man with a failing heart.

The second section weaves images from the writer's personal story together with those from his life as physician, and the third focuses primarily on life lived as a gay man among the sick and dying, patients to be treated and friends to be mourned while life remains to be claimed and savored.

Despite the pain and grief attested to in many of the poems, a lively voice of clarity, compassion, and consent to the goodness of life even on hard terms gives the collection a defining note of celebration. Pereira's lines about a bereaved Cambodian seamstress suggest something true about his own work: ". . . she joins the circle / of other Khmer women to sew. / Punctuating the fabric / with yellow thread, finding her remnants / into a piece that will hold." ("What is Lost")

View full annotation

Summary:

This story of love and marriage under the shadow of AIDS travels a couple's unlikely journey from meeting to courtship to disclosure of the male partner's AIDS, through a subsequent breakup, then a decision to marry, and four years of almost inexplicably happy marriage dogged from the beginning by the specter of death.

Over this time the couple has a chance to explore their respective understandings of the life of the spirit and for Hyung Goo to entertain and reject a number of avenues of comfort before joining his wife, a Presbyterian theologian and seminary professor, in her faith. Much of their short life together is lived in the context of intersecting circles of medical people and church community, in both of which they are active participants whose challenging marriage becomes a mirror and a lamp to their cohort.

View full annotation

Summary:

This collection by a physician-poet covers a wide spectrum in topic and tone. The poems in the first of the four sections speak in voices of those waiting surgical outcomes, those whose loved ones are about to undergo invasive and dangerous procedures, those who are coming to terms (partly clinical terms) with death. The poems in the second section focus more explicitly on Jewish experience, and on experiences of suffering that take place in the wider context of biblical tradition and recent history.

The third section features lighter-hearted poems, many rhymed, that make playful reference to moments in domestic life and relationship which, while not free of suffering and anxiety, are also the stuff of laughter. The fourth focuses on love--erotic, romantic, familial--and death, which includes the ordinary losses that living through time entails. Elegiac, wistful, musing, and poignant, they end the collection in a complex, sustained key that holds an elegant tension between sorrow and hope.

View full annotation

Summary:

Neely Tucker, a white journalist from Mississippi on assignment to Zimbabwe, and his wife, Vita, an African American from Detroit, volunteer to spend time with orphaned and abandoned children, many victims of the desperation caused by AIDS. In the orphanage, where a distressing number of children die due to lack of medicines or basic materials, or lack of adequate staff training, they come upon and find themselves deeply drawn to a particularly tiny, sick, vulnerable baby, abandoned in the desert. The director of the orphanage picks a name for her as she does for the other orphans: Chipo.

The Tuckers arrange to take her home, first for weekend care visits, hoping thereafter to do a more permanent foster care arrangement and then adopt her. A long story of struggle with Zimbabwean bureaucracy ensues, through which one learns much about suspicion of white Americans who want children, the ways in which child care becomes one more issue in partisan politics, and how abandoned children are caught in adults’ power struggles. Interspersed with this moving story are brief accounts of sometimes harrowing trips to other parts of Africa, including sites of major warfare in Rwanda and Uganda.

Tucker also intersperses memories of encounters with families in Bosnia during his work there. Ultimately, and only after much persistence, empathetic individuals in the system, and some newly learned under-the-table skills, the adoption papers come through and the family makes its way back to American where Tucker begins his ongoing assignment at the Washington Post.

View full annotation

Summary:

The editor solicited this collection of thirteen stories on the theme of entrapment from experienced young adult fiction writers. They represent a variety of kinds of entrapment: in a relationship too serious too early; in an abusive relationship; in a body distorted through the psychological lens of anorexia; in a dream world; in a canyon fire; in a web of secrets woven in an abused childhood; in a maze with a minotaur; in a habit of perfectionism; in the sites of urban violence; in dementia induced by post-traumatic stress (long remembered by a Viet Nam vet); in an unsought relationship with a lost and disturbed brother; in poverty. In each of the stories an adolescent protagonist encounters some challenge either to find his or her way out of a trap, or to understand others’ entrapments. The stories vary widely in setting and style, but held together by this theme, they serve to enlarge understanding of the ways in which any of us may find ourselves entrapped, and how “liberation” may require both imagination and compassion.

View full annotation

Summary:

In this poem, the speaker’s mother has lupus [systemic lupus erythematosis], a "disease / of self-attack" where, for example, when the police arrive at a mugging, "they beat up on you / instead of on your attackers." The speaker goes on to reflect on the logic of such an illness residing in the body of "A halfbreed woman" who, for historical reasons, "can hardly do anything else / but attack herself." Being Indian and white, the speaker says, "cancel each other out. / Leaving no one in the place," which would be fine except that, being a woman, she must perform caring duties regardless of her circumstance. The speaker describes her mother’s physical pain, her ". . . eyes burn, / they tear themselves apart . . . / her joints swell to the point / of explosion, eruption," concluding with the observation that "when volatile substances are intertwined, / when irreconcilable opposites meet, / the crucible and its contents vaporize."

View full annotation

Summary:

With some 70 characters and a wide array of events spanning 500 years and several continents, the plot of this novel is less a linear plot than an elaborate web of events. Peopled with addicts, alcoholics, corrupt judges and politicians, unscrupulous and greedy land speculators, and a host of other unsavory characters, the novel also tells the story of resistance to Euro-American oppression and a growing effort of indigenous people and their allies to retake the land and ultimately to become agents of its healing. Woven throughout the novel are folk stories of the past, pronouncements on the present and predictions of a dire future for the offspring of the European conquerors.

Spatially, Tucson, Arizona functions as a focal point, with much of the action radiating away from, or towards, the city. Arizona is about to go belly-up from the effects of a declining economy and devastating drought and growing civil unrest in Mexico. As the prophecies have foretold, the narrator reminds readers, the inexorable movement of the people is North, and while it may take 500 or 5000 years, the indigenous and their allies will reclaim the diseased and corrupted land (and presumably become instruments of its healing).

Into this milieu Silko inserts a host of characters who work as part of the resistance. Among them are twin sisters Lecha (a demerol-addicted psychic who helps police locate the bodies of murder victims and has a lucrative profession as a talk show guest) and Zeta (who has made a fortune running drugs and guns across the North and South American borders with the help of Lecha’s son and his sometime lover Paulie); twin brothers, Tacho (a chauffeur for the wealthy Menardo who also functions as a spy for the indigenous resistance movement), and El Feo (who heads that movement in the far South of Mexico). Both brothers commune with spirit macaws for advice.

There is an "army of the Homeless" who plan to retake "stolen" goods and land from the wealthy. The Barefoot Hopi organizes incarcerated prisoners for an uprising against the U.S. Government. Many of these and other characters converge at novel’s end at the International Holistic Healer’s Convention where "German root doctors" and "Celtic leech handlers" join with "new-age spiritualists" and the Green Vengeance eco-warriors.

View full annotation

Summary:

A middle class African-American widow, Avey Marshall, has set off on a cruise with two of her friends from work on the "Bianca Pride," and becomes ill shortly after they have set sail. Avey disembarks in Grenada after experiencing disequilibrium, nausea, disturbing nightmares, and a feeling of being "clogged and swollen." Thus begins a journey of reclamation and healing of a past that has been largely forgotten or erased in her efforts to escape the poverty of her younger years and obtain the American dream of financial security and a white-defined respectability.

The novel is divided into four parts: Avey's growing distress on board the cruise ship, the intensification of nightmares and "visits" from her long-dead and very Afro-centric Great Aunt Cuney, and her decision to leave the cruise ship. The second section takes place in her hotel room where Avey confronts her rage and grief, not only over the death of her husband, but the utter waste in his drive for material success and the ensuing loss of their joy in each other and their heritage.

In the third section, Avey, getting lost on a walk, meets Lebert Joseph who convinces her to accompany him on the "Carriacou Excursion," an annual island festival honoring the long-time ancestors. Avey travels by small boat to Carriacou, becoming violently ill, and is cared for by a group of women on the boat, encouraging her in this "cleansing." This journey and her illness prompt Avey to think about the middle passage of slaves and the horrors they endured in countless journeys much worse than hers.

Once on the island, in the fourth section of the book, Avey is bathed and nursed back to health by Lebert Joseph's daughter, Rosalie Parvay. Finally, Avey joins the celebration (the "Big Drum"), witnessing and finally joining the important "Beg Pardon" and nation dances. This section brings the novel full circle as Avey experiences reconciliation with her past, her heritage, and herself.

View full annotation