Summary:

In this novel the narrator travels by train from the present into the past and back again. The narrator boards a train in Soviet Moscow; travels to Leningrad in a compartment with some not too friendly people; stays overnight in a relative's run-down, crowded apartment; and rambles through the streets of Leningrad, stopping to visit Dostoyevsky's last place of residence, which is now a museum.

However, this framing story occupies very little of the book. During the train ride, the narrator re-imagines a much earlier trip in April 1867, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his young wife, Anna Grigoryevna, travel by train to Baden-Baden in Germany. They will remain abroad for four years, as Dostoyevsky indulges in his passion (and later obsession) for gambling.

In Baden-Baden he loses all their money; he pawns their belongings and loses; he begs and borrows money from friends and publishers, and loses. Each time he loses, he comes home to their rented apartment and throws himself at Anna's feet. He protests his love, berates himself, and promises to do better in the future; and Anna forgives him.

In this dream-like story, repentance and forgiveness, memory and desire, hope and despair revolve like electrons around Dostoevsky's addiction to gambling. Fyodor and Anna recall earlier events in their lives; for example, Anna remembers herself as a hesitant young secretary arriving for the first time to take dictation from the famous man; and Fyodor, the former convict, Slavophile author of Crime and Punishment, remembers being scornfully dismissed by the smooth and sophisticated Turgenev.

Within the 1867 framework, the story seems to be stuck, unable to move forward, although we know from our late 20th century perspective--as Tsypkin recalls (and invents) the events while on his train trip to Leningrad--they are part of a larger story which moves inexorably forward through time and ends at the Dostoevsky house in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), with the moving scene of Fyodor's last days. And the two stories converge as Tsypkin visits the Dostoevsky museum where those last days took place.

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Summary:

Abba Kovner wrote these poems during and after his hospitalization at Sloan Kettering for throat cancer. His exile into the world of illness begins as he enters the hospital. "He fell asleep under strange skies" (p. 7) and in the hospital "the silence astounds on all / its many floors."(p. 11) [Throughout the book, Kovner refers to himself in the 3rd person.] He tries to pray: "Is there a prayer for one who prays like him / seething . . . " (p. 15) He decries "the infuriating confidence of the doctors." (p. 21) He celebrates the beauty and magnificence of New York. But then the bad news arrives: "When they told him they were going to cut away his vocal cords / entirely it was merely / a confirmation of what he already knew."(p. 31)

To the brisk, young hospital staff, he is just another patient, nothing but an "ancient shard”: "They could not imagine that this was a man / who had fought the world."(p. 36) Only Norma, the Puerto Rican night nurse, connects with him at a different, more human level. "He blushes / when Norma says: What a lovely / head of hair you have, sir!" (p. 88) As he prepares for the laryngectomy, images from the past invade his consciousness--Christmas Eve, 1941; the Vilna ghetto, where "the lice / got under your skin" (p. 68); and "a shoemaker, his name forgotten" (p. 74). The Holy Guests--the souls of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David--also visit the sick room.

After the surgery, the conspiracy of optimism brings him along, carries him forward: "What a healthy recovery, / they said. And patted him on the shoulder / with admiration: You’re doing fine. Wow!" (p. 85) But this is at best a voiceless recovery: "From the wreckage of his voice / there arose a bubble / a tiny bubble . . . " (p. 101) Eventually, the patient leaves the hospital, leaves New York, and arrives home: "Fearful from the moment of arrival: he / watches the landing that cannot / be avoided, into / the arms / of people who love him . . . " (p. 111) He settles into a routine, lives his life as if there is nothing new, but ends at "An Ending, Unfinished" (p. 126), back at Sloan Kettering. "Where now? He asked himself . . . " What next?

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Summary:

A lonely neurosurgical resident becomes involved with a comatose patient. Susan, a dying woman with an inoperable brain tumor, is the subject of a research study. Scientists are attempting to discern her thoughts with the aid of computers. The resident serendipitously stumbles onto a program that successfully translates the electrical activity of Susan's brain into speech. He labels the computer program a failure (but saves a copy for himself) so that others are unable to eavesdrop on her dreams.

He spends nights listening to her thoughts and soon begins communicating with Susan, sharing his own secrets with her. When the resident learns that the research project is about to be terminated, he decides that Susan is in desperate need of human contact. He kisses her and presumably has sexual intercourse with the comatose woman. The next morning he is found asleep beside her and is dismissed from the hospital.

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Summary:

When Gerald is three, his mother, a drug addict, leaves him alone one time too often and he accidentally sets the apartment on fire. His mother is imprisoned for negligence, he goes to the hospital, and thereafter lives with "Aunt Queen," a great-aunt who exercises considerable authority from her wheelchair, and gives him all the love his mother hasn't.

When he is 9, however, his mother returns with a new sister and a man who claims to be the sister's father. They want to take him "home"; Gerald wants to stay with Aunt Queen. The matter is settled unhappily when Aunt Queen dies of a heart attack.

Gerald soon learns to despise his stepfather for his violence and, eventually, for the abuse of his half sister, which she hides out of fear until she's driven to confess it to Gerald in hope of his protection. Their mother remains in denial about that problem as well as her own and her husband's addictions to alcohol and drugs.

Caring for his sister, however, keeps love in Gerald's life. In defending her one last time, the apartment catches fire and his stepfather is killed. As he, his sister, and his mother ride away in the ambulance, a flicker of hope survives in the darkness for another new chapter in family life, this time without violence.

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Summary:

This translation of Akhmatova’s poem contains only 79 words, including articles and prepositions. There are 12 lines, consisting of a small number of sentences and parts-of-sentences. Why is it worth including in this database?

With a few words, the author sketches the lonely city at night, then comments, "Some good-for-nothing--who knows why--/ made up the tale that love exists on earth." What is the result of this story? Most people, in fact, believe that love exists, and they organize their lives around this belief. They sing, they dance, "they wait eagerly for meetings." The truth that love does not exist is a secret, which only "reveals itself to some . . . " Unfortunately, "I found this out by accident / and now it seems I’m sick all the time." Thus, the poem begins with a fiction (love exists) that seems to make most people happy, and it ends with a fact (love does not exist) that causes sickness rather than happiness. [12 lines]

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This is a rich and diverse anthology of poetry and of prose extracts, both fictional and non-fictional, about becoming a parent. It is organized into three chronological sections: "First Stirrings," about becoming and being pregnant (or of having a pregnant partner: the father’s perspective is refreshingly well-represented throughout), "The Welcoming," about labor and birth, and bringing home the newborn, and "Now That I am Forever With Child," about being the parent of an infant.

Each section contains a cross-section of views, from, for instance, Elizabeth Spires’s languid letter to the fetus inside her to Rosemary Bray’s candid account of her ambivalence about being pregnant; from Julianna Baggott’s thoughts on the Madonna and child, and A. S. (Antonia Susan) Byatt ’s rather frightening description of giving birth in a British hospital in the 1960s, to Hunt Hawkins’s sad poem about holding his dying newborn daughter; and from Jesse Green’s memoir as a gay parent adopting a son to Kate Daniels’s prayer for her children.

The anthology ends with the powerful poem by Audre Lorde that gives its title to the book’s last section. Lorde encapsulates the astonishing change of focus and identity at the heart of becoming a parent.

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Summary:

This collection of 36 poems, some of which have been published individually in various literary magazines, is primarily about dead--or nearly dead--family members: a brother and sister lost to cancer; the speaker's palsied, nearly blind father dying of Parkinson's disease; his mother's struggle with chronic arthritis and heart disease.

The collection is divided into three untitled sections. The first deals primarily with the aging and death of the speaker's parents; the second with a wider range of abandonment and death, lost loves, dreams, innocence; the third almost exclusively with his sister's six year struggle with breast cancer and dying.

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Summary:

A dark comedy about an upper-middle class blended family living the technology overloaded, mall-mad contemporary American life in a small midwestern town until catastrophe strikes. Jack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. He is married to his fourth wife Babette, who reads tabloids to the blind and teaches posture classes to senior citizens. Together, they have four children, and a quirky extended family.

Interspersed in the noisy, chaotic family relationships is the central questions that obsesses Jack and Babette: who will die first? Death is everywhere in this story--on TV, radio, at the mall, in Hitler studies, and at home. Then an industrial accident releases an "airborne toxic event"--a lethal cloud of Nyodene D. to which Jack is exposed.

Absurd, witty, and almost plausible, the catastrophe answers his question about who will die first, but tells him nothing about death itself. What is the meaning of death, and, by implication, life? In the final section, dying Jack goes to hospital and meets nun Sister Hermann Marie and questions her about her faith. She explains that her piety is only a pretence: . . . "we are here to embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things the world would collapse." (p. 318)

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At the heart of this novel is a simple love story. Dr. Bruno Sachs, a slight, stooped, and somewhat unkempt general practitioner in a French village is dedicated to his work and loved by his patients. Sachs is a solitary, self-effacing man who takes his Hippocratic duties seriously and is especially sensitive to the needs of his patients.

In addition to his private practice, Sachs works part-time at an abortion clinic, where he performs an abortion on a distraught young woman named Pauline Kasser. Soon the doctor and his patient fall in love. She moves in with him and becomes pregnant. An editor by profession, Pauline also encourages and assists Dr. Sachs in completing the book he is writing.

The story has many additional layers and dimensions. The reader views Sachs through the eyes of multiple narrators--his patients, colleagues, friends and acquaintances, all of whom write in the first person and present Bruno Sachs as "you" or "he." Thus, the reader gradually builds up a "connection" (empathy) with Sachs by synthesizing multiple glimpses of his behavior and facets of his character. At the same time, Sachs is trying to find his own voice, his own connection, by becoming a writer. At first he jots down random thoughts, then he keeps a notebook, and eventually he produces a complete manuscript.

The book has innovative structural elements that introduce other layers of meaning. For example, the 112 short chapters are organized into seven sections, corresponding with the components of a complete clinical case history: presentation (as in "chief complaint"), history, clinical examination, further investigations, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. Similarly, the narratives delve progressively into Sachs' "illness" and follow the "patient" through his course of "treatment."

Another structural element is the cycle of fertility and gestation. The story takes place from September through June, precisely 40 weeks, a pregnancy of nine months, during which Sachs is re-born.

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Summary:

Set in post- World War II Vienna, this movie is "a portrait of postwar corruption and the death of idealism" (Michael Wilmington, in the DVD insert). Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) comes to Vienna at the request of his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). He arrives to find that Harry has been killed in a questionable automobile accident. A police inspector (Trevor Howard) informs Holly that his friend Harry had been involved in racketeering and maybe deserved to die.

Trying to clear the name of his friend, Holly discovers the depth of his friend's evilness--Harry was not a petty thief; he was involved in stealing penicillin from military bases and then selling diluted (and thus ineffective) doses to hospitals. The police inspector convinces Holly to turn on his friend (Harry was not the victim of the automobile accident--another of his cruel deeds!) who is finally killed by Holly in the sewers of Vienna. Of course there is Harry's girlfriend (Alida Valli) who rebuffs Holly and remains true till the end to Harry.

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