Summary:

In this poem, dedicated to his brother, Stephen Dunn reflects back on childhood (and childish) parent-child relationships. The first stanza concerns the dead and the stories that keep them alive: parents who "died at least twice, / the second time when we forgot their stories . . . " The transitional second stanza asks, "what is the past if not unfinished work," prefacing the last stanza, in which the adult poet recognizes how self centered children are--"the only needy people on earth"--and wonders what his parents "must have wanted . . . back from us." But, he concludes, "We know what it is, don't we? / We've been alive long enough."

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The family in this story seems perfect: well-to-do, situated in a lovely home at the edge of Lake Tahoe, three children in the home, a retired military grandfather, and a caring, competent mother (Tilda Swinton). The absentee father, a military officer, is at sea. All appears as calm and still as the deep lake in their physical midst and at the story's center.

The story primarily concerns the mother and Beau, the oldest son (Jonathan Tucker), an extremely sensitive and gifted musician currently being considered for a scholarship at a major university. What viewers come to know is that the young man is exploring his sexuality with an inappropriate male opportunist in the nearby city.

When the mother suspects that her son is meeting someone, she confronts the amused man, asks him to back off, and returns home. The man finds their home that same night, meets with the son, and demands money. When the spurned man leaves, he slips on the dock and hits his head on a rock. The son had already returned to the house.

The surface world of lunches, carpools, and school activities is shattered by the mother's discovery of the familiar body in the lake at the edge of the family dock. Unbeknownst to the mother, the death of the man/her son's initial partner, is accidental. She assumes the worst and automatically moves to protect her son. While managing the ordinary routine for her family, she struggles to get the body into a skiff and sink it with weights in a different location.

Of course the body is discovered within a short time and unfortunately for the mother, associates of the deceased are able to figure out the scenario, or at least the connections with the son. She is approached by blackmailers with impossible financial demands.

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Born breech and deprived of oxygen for two hours, Irish poet and writer Christopher Nolan was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and is unable to speak and virtually unable to move voluntarily. His book, subtitled "The Life Story of Christopher Nolan," is narrated as a third person account of the life of "Joseph Meehan." The memoir opens with Meehan's winning the British Spastics' Society Literary Award for his first book of poetry, Dam-Burst of Dreams (1988) and ends with his last day at Trinity College, having turned down the invitation to continue his studies there towards a degree.

In the mixture of linear, traditional life narrative and lyrical, neologistic description that falls in between, the memoir addresses Meehan's birth, early life, education, and growing acclaim as a poet and writer. It recounts how his family and teachers helped develop a combination of medication, tools (a "unicorn-stick" attached to his forehead), and assistance that allowed him to type.

It details, above all, how various family, friends, and health and education professionals advocated Meehan's special-school and mainstream education and made available to him such normative life experiences as riding a pony, boating, fishing, skipping school with his mates, and going on school trips without his parents--and such unusual life experiences as becoming an award-winning writer.

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The story begins in New York as a young immigrant Scandinavian woman gives birth to a daughter: "She entered, as Venus from the sea, dripping. The air enclosed her, she felt it all over her, touching, waking her." The time is at the turn of the 20th century, the baby's name is Flossie, and she is the second child of Joe and Gurlie Stecher. Joe is a printer, who takes great pride in his craftsmanship. He had once been a union activist, but became disillusioned with union corruption and now works as a shop foreman. Gurlie's driving ambition is for she and her husband to strike it rich and make their mark in this new land, where the streets are paved in gold (for some people).

Flossie turns out to be a sickly baby. At first, she won't nurse at all and almost dies of malnutrition and infection. Later, she remains so scrawny that a doctor claims the only way to save her life is to take her to live in the country. Thus, Gurlie and her two children travel to upstate New York for the summer, where they board with an aged Norwegian couple. While there, the baby begins to thrive, and so does Gurlie, who had spent her early childhood on a farm in Scandinavia.

Soon after Flossie's birth, the printers' union calls a strike. Joe successfully holds the line and keeps the shop running, but his grateful employers are not grateful enough even to give him a raise. Toward the end of the book, he negotiates with another businessman to obtain the wherewithal to start his own printing company.

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A 63 year old biologist, blind since childhood, collects snails and shells in Africa. His self-imposed isolation is shattered after he is credited with saving the lives of an American woman and a native eight year old girl who are both suffering from malaria. The venom of a cone shell provides the cure. Strangers flock to the scientist’s abode hoping to find their own miraculous remedy, but instead a few discover tragedy or even death.

The biologist’s own adult son dies from a cone shell bite while visiting his father. In the end, the shell collector is also bitten by a cone and experiences both paralysis and clarity in his near-death condition. He survives with the aid of the young girl whom he had earlier cured of malaria.

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This is one of several histories or collections of documents concerning the ill-fated Donner Party westward trip of 1846-47. The wagon train of inexperienced and irregularly prepared families and individuals were California-bound from Illinois. Their misfortunes seem to have begun when they chose to follow the directions of a man who suggested a "short-cut."

Following upon a dreadful passage through the Wahsatch [sic] Mountains and then across the salt flats west of the Great Salt Lake, the group attempted the Sierra Nevada mountains too late in the fall to precede the snow and the cold. For the months of November through March, the party ( now cast asunder and without leadership) made various attempts at wintering over versus futile assaults on the pass.

From the diaries and other records surrounding this misadventure, the historian puts together a summation of the horrors of the cold, starvation, and growing hopelessness of being trapped and ill-prepared for a winter in the wilderness. Based on some of the diary entries, a sense of the extent of desperation that resulted in cannibalism is made available to the reader of today.

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In this collection of 11 short stories, pediatrician-author Perri Klass primarily explores the world of women and their multiple and complex roles as mother, mother-to-be, friend, spouse, lover and professional. Parenthood--its glories, heartaches, tensions and mysteries--plays a prominent role in many of the stories. There is also a close look at woman-woman friendship--at what women say to their best friends and the nuances of the emotional responses to what is said or left unsaid.

Several stories feature single mothers: "For Women Everywhere" (a woman is helped through labor by her best friend), "Rainbow Mama" (a woman cares for her son during his diagnosis and initial treatment of leukemia), and "City Sidewalks" (a woman finds a baby on the sidewalk on Christmas Eve as she rushes to pick up her child from day care).

"In Necessary Risks," an anesthesiologist deals with work and her high energy preschool daughter while husband and easy-to-raise son head out to a dude ranch. In "The Trouble with Sophie," another high energy, dominant daughter wreaks havoc in kindergarten as well as with her concerned parents. In addition to the anesthesiologist, two other physician-mothers are featured in "Freedom Fighter" and "Love and Modern Medicine."

Parenting a newborn whilst handling other tasks is a theme featured in "Intimacy" (a high school biology teacher celebrates her first night of uninterrupted sleep as she both enjoys and envies her single friend's sex life) and in "Dedication" (a writer takes his stepson to a chess tournament while his biologist wife and newborn enjoy breastfeeding at home). Woman friendships are prominent in "For Women Everywhere," "Freedom Fighter," and "The Province of the Bearded Fathers." Grief and sudden infant death syndrome are themes of "Love and Modern Medicine."

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In the "free love" context of the nineteen-sixties, Harriet and David Lovatt are throwbacks to a more conservative, traditional, and family-oriented decade. Their life dream is to have a big house in the country filled with children, and it seems that they will succeed. After bearing four young children, however, Harriet is feeling the strain of years of childbearing, sleeplessness, money trouble, and her parents' and in-laws' disapproval of her fecundity.

Her fifth pregnancy is not only unplanned, but also unusually painful and disruptive. Harriet's doctor prescribes sedatives but finds nothing abnormal in her situation. When Ben is born, Harriet jokes that he is like "a troll or a goblin," but no one responds well to this unusually hairy and physically vigorous baby, who in turn does not respond to anything but his own desires and fears.

As he grows older, family pets and other children seem to be in physical danger. Health care professionals do not confirm the couple's conviction that Ben is not normal, but neither do they obstruct the decision to send Ben to a private institution, a removal that leaves the family temporarily happy until Harriet visits Ben and recognizes the institution for what it is, a place where all manner of "different" children are sent to live heavily medicated, physically restrained, and foreshortened lives away from families who do not want them.

Harriet brings Ben home, where he grows up amid what remains of the Lovatts' domestic fantasy, and finds community in a gang of thuggish older boys whom Harriet suspects are involved in various criminal acts. As the story closes, Ben has left home and Harriet imagines him in another country, "searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind" (133).

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An American man and "a girl" sit drinking beer in a bar by a train station in northern Spain making self-consciously ironic, brittle small talk. The woman comments that the hills look like white elephants (hence the story's title). Eventually, the two discuss an operation, which the man earnestly reassures her is "awfully simple . . . not really an operation at all . . . all perfectly natural" (726).

The woman is unconvinced, questioning "what will we do afterward," but says she will have the operation because "I don't care about me" (727). A few moments later, however, she avers that they "could" have everything and go anywhere, suddenly as earnest as he had been earlier. When the man agrees that they "can" do these things, however, the woman now says no, they can't, her change in verb tense suggesting that the possible lives they once could have pursued (and produced) are even now, before any firm decision has been spoken, irrevocably out of reach. When the man says that he will go along with whatever she wants, the woman asks him to "please please please please please please please stop talking" or she will scream. The train arrives during this impasse, and once the bags are loaded, the woman, smiling brightly, insists she feels fine.

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Ruth Picardie was a journalist working in London. Shortly after her marriage in 1994 to Matt Seaton, also a journalist, she found a breast lump. After testing, she was told it was benign. Two years later, and a year after giving birth to twins, the lump enlarged and this time she was diagnosed with advanced, inoperable breast cancer. She rapidly developed bone, liver, and brain metastases and died in September 1997, aged 33.

This book consists of a selection of Picardie's e-mail correspondence during the last year of her life, the columns she wrote for the Observer newspaper (a series about dying she called "Before I say goodbye"), readers' letters responding to her column, and an introduction and epilogue by her husband. While not, then, strictly a memoir, this collection of texts constitutes an intimate view of a witty, angry young woman undergoing an intolerable illness.

The expected elements are there: diagnosis, chemotherapy, radiation, hope, the loss of hope. What is unexpected is the way these are presented, and the vividness with which we share the prospect of saying good bye to her children, her gradual detachment from her husband, and, as the brain metastases spread, the loss of coherence and the appalling silencing of her powerful voice.

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