Summary:

The prelude describes a tidal wave approaching Japan. The story is a first-person narrative by Professor Katsumi, inventor of a self-programming computer which can predict the future. Katsumi and his assistant, Tanamogi, plan to predict the future of a private, individual destiny. They choose a subject from the street and follow him. The next day's paper announces his murder.

To solve the case and forestall suspicion, Katsumi downloads the contents of the man's brain, reconstructs his existence, and questions him/it. The victim did not see his murderer, but he tells the team his mistress had sold her aborted foetus for 7000 yen. Then the mistress is murdered. Katsumi's wife has a forced abortion and receives 7000 yen. Katsumi suspects an organization. His assistant Tanamogi volunteers the name of an organization experimenting with extra-utero development of foetuses, and arranges for Katsumi to visit their lab. Gradually Katsumi learns of a vast conspiracy to create an underwater nation, complete with genetically altered water-oxygenating humans and animals, bred in anticipation of the predicted destruction of Japan by a tidal wave.

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A father whose child is born with a brain hernia tries to flee his responsibility for the child. In his shame, fear, and confusion he turns to alcohol and an old girlfriend and also agrees to give the child only sugar-water. The child wills to live, however, and finally the father, who has deserted others during his lifetime, realizes he cannot desert his son. He allows the surgeons to operate even though the child's future is uncertain.

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At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, while her father fights for the Republicans against Franco's forces which her deceased mother's family supports, fourteen-year-old Matia is forced to leave her elderly nanny and go to live with her maternal grandmother, aunt, and her fifteen-year-old male cousin, Borja. This is the summer the frightened, rebellious, and homesick Matia struggles with her changing body, and the changing relationships and behaviors she must have as a woman in her society. This is the summer Matia learns of social class, politics, sex, and family secrets; of love, honor, and betrayal.

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At some indeterminate point in time and space following World War II, George remembers telling Corinne the story he has told Blum. The discontinuous, contiguous rememberings and tellings--rememberings of tellings, tellings of rememberings--are the labyrinthine elements of George's searches for meanings: to his own life, to his ancestral identity, to the disastrous routing of French troops by German in May 1940, to the human condition. In the course of their textual wanderings, narrator and reader return again and again to specific scenes--trying to make sense of life and death, and the cardinal, corporal points between.

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A Boston attorney is injured on the road while traveling by buggy in Maine. His rescuer, who stabilizes his fractures and transports him to town for continued care, turns out, much to the patient's dismay, to be not only an attractive woman, but a very competent physician. As the attorney becomes increasingly aware of the quality of medical care he is receiving, he also finds himself falling in love with his doctor.

The work is replete with demonstrations of Dr. Zay's skill as physician, her humanity, and her professional commitment. Eventually her resistance to her suitor's offers of marriage is worn down, but she demands a contract which guarantees she will be able to continue the practice of medicine after the wedding. Set in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the novel romanticizes the practice of rural medicine and the contemporaneous view of late Victorian women pursuing this "masculine" profession.

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This short narrative is told in the first person, the person of the quack. The tale opens with the narrator in the public hospital ward, suffering from what his doctors say is Addison's disease, composing the tale of his adventures which makes up the bulk of the work. The narrator tells us about his training as a physician and his first practice, which was sufficiently non-lucrative that he determines to alter his career direction.

He moves through a series of increasingly seamy scams in search of quick and easy money--including claiming to be a homeopathic physician, then an expert in vegetable remedies and "electromagnetic" treatment, falling through a multitude of suspect activities culminating in his setting up shop as a spiritualist. His shady career is cut short by his illness, from which he abruptly dies, thus ending the narrative.

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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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Laurence "Tubby" Passmore is a successful scriptwriter for a television sitcom, in his mid-fifties, married and the father of two grown children. He is indecisive and inexplicably depressed, unhappy with himself, his fat body, bald head, wonky knee, and impending impotence. At least, he is confident in his marriage to Sally, an attractive, self-made academic who enjoys sex; on weekly jaunts to London, he maintains a supportive but platonic relationship with the earthy Amy.

Seeking to alleviate his woes, he dabbles in acupuncture and aromatherapy and regularly attends a blind physiotherapist and a woman psychiatrist; the latter counsels him to write a journal. His wife suddenly announces her wish for a divorce and the television network invokes a contractual obligation to make unwelcome demands on his skills. These events shatter his unappreciated but complacent "angst" and deepen his identity crisis.

Laurence scrambles to rediscover himself. He reads the gloomy, Kierkegaard--because he identified with the titles--and he travels to the existentialist's Copenhagen. He pushes the boundaries of his relationship with Amy in a maudlin trip to Tenerife. He befriends a philosophic squatter, called "Grahame" (with an "e" no doubt to distinguish him from Graham Green whose "writing is a form of therapy" is an epigraph to this book). He flies wildly off to Los Angeles hoping to rekindle a one-night stand "manqué." Finally he recalls and tracks the Irish Catholic, Maureen, his first girlfriend from forty years before. Maureen has suffered too--the death of her son and breast cancer; he finds her on the Road to Compostella.

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Summary:

Geek Love is the saga of a traveling carnival, the owners of which try to save it from financial failure by using ingested chemicals and toxins to create the birth of amazing freaks for the show. The outcome is a family that is both proud and vain about its specialness. The narrative unfolds the intricacies of greed and jealousy that tear the family asunder, resulting in the deaths of some members, the madness of others, and the escape of one.

It is Olympia, the hunchback albino dwarf, who lives on to tell the story of the Binewski clan. Central to the heyday of the carnival is Doc P, a physician of questionable credentials who performs bizarre operations in the traveling hospital that moves with the carnival. The story moves relentlessly toward a climax and denouement that is sufficiently unimaginable to be consistent with the cast of characters.

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In the "brave new world" of 632 A. F. (After Ford), universal human happiness has been achieved. (Well, almost.) Control of reproduction, genetic engineering, conditioning--especially via repetitive messages delivered during sleep--and a perfect pleasure drug called "Soma" are the cornerstones of the new society. Reproduction has been removed from the womb and placed on the conveyor belt, where reproductive workers tinker with the embryos to produce various grades of human beings, ranging from the super-intelligent Alpha Pluses down to the dwarfed semi-moron Epsilons.

Each class is conditioned to love its type of work and its place in society; for example, Epsilons are supremely happy running elevators. Outside of their work, people spend their lives in constant pleasure. This involves consuming (continually buying new things, whether they need them or not), participating in elaborate sports, and free-floating sex. While uninhibited sex is universal and considered socially constructive, love, marriage, and parenthood are viewed as obscene.

The story concerns Bernard, an alpha whose programming is a bit off--he is discontented and desires to spend time alone just thinking or looking at the stars. At one point he takes Lenina on a vacation to the savage reservation in New Mexico. There he discovers John (the Savage), son of Linda who had visited the reservation more than 20 years previously and was accidentally left behind. When she discovered she was pregnant (the ultimate humiliation!), she had to remain among the savages. John returns to the Brave New World where he is feted as the Visiting Savage. However, he cannot adapt to this totally alien society and, ultimately, he takes his own life.

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