Summary:

It is 1832. Europe is in turmoil of revolution and soon to be ravaged by cholera. Italians who resist the Austrian occupation of their country have fled to southern France where they are ruthlessly pursued and killed by special agents. Handsome, young, Angelo Pardi (Olivier Martinez), is an Italian fugitive whose wealthy but revolutionary-minded mother has purchased his rank of colonel. Upon learning that a friend has betrayed his cell of resistors, he determines to return to Italy carrying the funds raised for a defense.

But cholera has struck southern France. Roads and rivers are barricaded, quarantine is enforced, and he encounters death, decay, fear, and angry crowds who accuse every stranger of having caused the epidemic. Pardi meets an anxious doctor who teaches him a treatment for cholera, but moments later the doctor defies his own treatment to die of the illness caught from his patients.

As Pardi runs from both Austrian and French pursuers, he falls through a tiled roof into the life of the abandoned Pauline de Théus (Juliette Binoche). With almost comic formality, he becomes her chivalrous guide--her "angel(o)"--and leads her safely to her elderly husband through an improbable series of narrow escapes, including cholera itself. The doctor's dubious treatment comes in handy not only for saving her life but also as a pretext for nudity in their chaste relationship. A few years later, peace and health returned, Madame de Théus receives a letter from Italy. Her husband knows that he ought to let her go, but the credits roll as she gazes at the Alps and contemplates her decision.

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Patsy (Genevieve Lemon), a middle-aged wife and mother of three grown daughters and a son (Russell Dykstra), is dying of cancer. Her children return home to spend time with and care for their mother in her final days. Each family member and Patsy's sometimes charming, sometimes abusive husband, Vic (Linal Haft), must face conflicts past and present as well as reconcile themselves to their mother's dying.

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Keats urges his reader not to respond to melancholy by committing suicide. He says to avoid poisons like Wolf's-bane, nightshade, and yew berries. Instead, when most depressed, "glut thy sorrow" on the beauty of a rose or the rainbow of salt and sea. Likewise, if your mistress is angry with you, look into her eyes and feast on their ephemeral beauty.

Contrast is the key to pleasure. Melancholy is not the moment for death, but an opportunity for a fine experience. It is the fine balance between pain and pleasure that is ideal. The final stanza rephrases this idea. Beauty is always ephemeral; joy is always about to leave, but these are man's highest moments.

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Written from prison during the tenth year of a twenty-eight year sentence, "On Living" is a remarkably moving--in fact, uplifting--poem. It is written in three parts. The first part addresses the seriousness of life: "you must live with great seriousness / like a squirrel, for example--" (p.128); later, and more poignantly: "I mean, you must take living so seriously / that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees-- / and not for your children either," (p.128).

The second part deals with hope and commitment and relates directly to his time in prison. "Let's say we're in prison / and close to fifty, / and we have eighteen more years, say, / before the iron doors will open. / We'll still live with the outside, / with its people and animals, struggle and wind--" (p.129).

The third section deals with the universal, with our grieving for the earth which ". . . will grow cold one day, / not like a block of ice / or a dead cloud even / but like an empty walnut it will roll along / in pitch-black space . . . / You must grieve for this right now / --you have to feel this sorrow now--/ for the world must be loved this much / if you're going to say 'I lived' . . . " (p.129-30).

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Leap into the world imagined by Kurt Vonnegut, WNYC's reporter on the afterlife, and land with him at the Pearly Gates, or more precisely, "the hundred yards or so of vacant lot between the far end of the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates" (8). There, Vonnegut, forever the humanist, has his interviewees talk about that which is of ultimate importance--how they lived (or should have lived) their lives.

Vonnegut begins his journeys from the state-of-the-art lethal injection facility in Huntsville, Texas, and reaches his destination though the able assistance of Jack Kevorkian. Who does he meet at the mid-point of his round trip journeys? Dead folks--many famous ones, some not so famous--21 in all (including his fictional creation, Kilgore Trout). Also on the list of interviewees are John Brown, Clarence Darrow, William Shakespeare, Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley, Karla Faye Tucker (actually put to death in the Huntsville facility), and Isaac Asimov.

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In this eight-line poem, the speaker describes her own birth. Kenyon uses rich imagery and word-sound to evoke her appearance on this earth. Emerging from her mother's "large clay" as the surgeon "parted darkness," the newborn is assaulted with harsh light, noise, and a "vast freedom" that is "terrible."

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In this book Robert Coles elucidates the nature of moral leadership by presenting a series of narratives about moral leaders. These are individuals who have made significant contributions to the author's moral development, mostly through personal interaction, but in some cases through their writings or their influence on other people.

The subjects include public personages like Robert Kennedy, Dorothy Day (of the Catholic Worker), Danilo Dolci (a Sicilian community organizer), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Erik Erikson; writers who have influenced Coles, such as Joseph Conrad and Ralph Waldo Emerson; and "ordinary" persons whom he encountered over the years in his studies of the moral lives of children.

The "ordinary" person category is most extraordinary. Coles draws heavily on personal interviews that reconstruct the courageous narratives of people like Andrew Thomas, a young Mississippian who worked on the voter registration project during the summer of 1964; Donita Gaines, one of the first black teenagers to "integrate" an all-white high school in Atlanta in 1961; and Albert Jones, a parent who volunteered to drive the school bus that carried black children in 1967 from Roxbury to a previously all-white school in South Boston.

However, the clearest and most powerful narrative that emerges from this book is that of the author himself, as he develops from young, socially conscious child psychiatrist to a middle-aged man seeking to understand what it means to be a moral leader in today's world.

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The story takes place in the distant future on a world called New Sparta, shortly after the Irredentist rebellion has been put down. Edward Maret, a wealthy and likeable young man, is about to get married, but doesn't realize until too late that he has enemies close at hand. As a result of their betrayal, Edward disappears into the bowels of the police establishment, only to emerge as a zombie-like cyborg (AX-17). After surviving several years as a cyborg-soldier who has no memory of his human life, AX-17 is captured by the alien Kliya, who initiate a process that leads the cyborg to regain his human identity.

Edward Maret re-emerges--a man betrayed, a man who suffers incalculable pain, a man who has lost everything, including the love of his life. The brutalized man journeys across the galaxy to the Confederation, where physical existence has become a burden to humans, who spend most of their "real" lives in a virtual world of wish fulfillment.

Eventually, he returns to New Sparta with a new identity and a plan to obtain his revenge. Piece by piece the elaborate plan falls into place. Yet at the climax, Edward is forced to look deeply into his character and motivation, while coming to terms with his past.

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Much to the disapproval of her children, a newly-widowed seventy-two year old woman decides to continue living independently and spends her time in disreputable behavior like going to the cinema alone, visiting insalubrious parts of town, eating at inns, and going to the races. She befriends a middle-aged cobbler (who is also, scandalously, a Social Democrat) and a young "feeble-minded" kitchen maid, and she stops visiting her husband's grave. One of her sons assumes she must be sick and wants to call the doctor. Without consulting her children, she mortgages her large house and apparently gives the money to her cobbler.

The narrator (her grandchild) observes that she has lived two lives: the first as dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, and the second "as Mrs. B, an unattached person without responsibilities." She dies suddenly, without illness, and the grandchild describes a photograph taken of her corpse after death: she has the face of one who "had savoured to the full the long years of servitude and the short years of freedom and consumed the bread of life to the last crumb."

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Kate, a doctoral student, has chosen to move far away from the small town in which she grew up and in which her widowed mother (a school superintendent) and brother (an insurance man) still live. Kate's life is solitary, punctuated by unsatisfactory and transitory sexual relationships with men; she has headaches and wonders if "there were an agent in her body, a secret in her blood making ready to work against her" (p. 180).

While her mother disagrees with Kate's life choices, their long-distance relationship is sisterly, playful, and intimate. Kate sends her mother Valentine's Day cards, "a gesture of compensatory remembrance" since her father's death six years earlier (177). One year Kate forgets to send the card; soon after, her mother is suddenly hospitalized for tests that reveal a brain tumor.

Kate's brother insists that if she wants to come home, she must keep quiet about the likelihood of the tumor's malignance and the risk that the upcoming surgery will result in paralysis. He argues that their mother is terrified and that there is no point in making her more afraid. Kate objects to the concealment of the truth but complies unwillingly with her brother's request.

She gains permission to take her mother for a ten-minute walk outside, just time enough to take a ferris wheel ride. As their car reaches the top of the wheel, Kate is clearly upset. Her mother comforts her, saying, "I know all about it . . . I know what you haven't told me" (196).

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