Summary:

The narrator, Latimer, begins the story with a vision of his death, which he attributes to a heart attack. He explains that, always sensitive after a childhood eye affliction and his mother's death, the further shock of a "severe illness" while at school in Geneva enabled him to see the future, and to hear others' thoughts--an experience which he describes as oppressive. He is fascinated by his brother's fiancée, Bertha, the only human whose thoughts are hidden from him, and whom he marries after his brother dies in a fall.

The marriage falters after Latimer eventually discerns Bertha's cold and manipulative nature through a temporary increase in his telepathy. When Latimer's childhood friend, the scientist Charles Meunier, performs an experimental transfusion between himself and Bertha's just-dead maid, the maid briefly revives and accuses Bertha of plotting to poison Latimer. Bertha moves out, and Latimer dies as foretold.

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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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Salvadorian writer and activist Claribel Alegria has composed a sequence of poems, 47 sparse love letters to her late husband Darwin "Bud" Flakoll who died in 1995. Neither sentimental nor confessional, the poems draw on the struggles of Circe, Prometheus, and Orpheus as well as themes of unfinished rites, sadness, and symbolic immortality. The translator's preface is a reminiscence of her time with the couple then living in self-imposed exile, in addition to a critical introduction to the poetry.

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In "Fortitude" Dr. Elbert Little, a Vermont family physician, visits the laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein and his trusty assistant, Dr. Tom Swift. Frankenstein has only one patient, Sylvia Lovejoy. His life work has been to keep Lovejoy alive. In 78 operations over the last 36 years, Frankenstein has replaced every one of her organs with prosthetic devices, so that now she consists of a head on a tripod, attached by tubes to various machines.

Frankenstein controls her mood, as he controls all her functions, from a "fantastically complicated" master console. Usually he makes sure that she feels joyful and loving, but last month a transistor went bad in one of the machines and she felt depressed for a while; so depressed, in fact, that she wrote to Dr. Little and asked him to bring her some cyanide.

Lovejoy's only friend is Gloria, the beautician who comes every day to care for her hair. Gloria is horrified over what Sylvia Lovejoy has become; she sees only a "spark" of the real person remaining, but she knows that the "spark" wants to die. After Frankenstein fires Gloria for speaking about death in Sylvia's presence, she sneaks back into the room when Sylvia is sleeping and puts a loaded revolver in her knitting bag.

Later, Sylvia finds the gun and tries to kill herself, but her prosthetic arms have been designed not to allow her to do that. Instead, she shoots Frankenstein, who promptly becomes the second head attached to the machines. (It seems he has designed all the prosthetic organs to be able to serve two "persons," so that he and Sylvia will be able to "live in such perfect harmony . . . that the gods themselves will tear out their hair in envy!")

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This splendid poem describes the writer's image of his own death in a very matter-of-fact and conversational style. If he's lucky, he tells us, he'll die in the hospital, surrounded by machines and loved ones. His friends will be there to give him support; he'll be able to tell them how much he loves them. If he's unlucky, however, "as I deserve," he'll just drop dead and not have a chance to say farewell properly. But, whatever happens, he just wants to say "I was happy when I was here . . . . "

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The short story considers the final afternoon in the lives of Jeff and Jennie Patton, a frail elderly couple, who have spent their lives as poor sharecroppers, barely able to make ends meet for themselves and their children. While neither is seriously ill, the severities of farming and aging have guided them toward a mutual pact. Today they will put on their finest clothes and then, drive down the dirt road past their neighbors toward a cliff--and death.

The simple story is gripping as readers discover what this couple is about. While they have been defeated by their tight-fisted landlord and by age, their spirits are indomitable. With charm and pathos, the couple fulfills the pledge they made to one another when no other alternative seemed appropriate.

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Summary:

Marat, a leader of the French Revolution of 1789, is portrayed just after being stabbed to death in his bath by a fervent revolutionist, Charlotte Corday. The faked letter of introduction with which she fraudulently entered his home is still held in the dead man's hand. Three quarters of the gray-brown bathtub is covered by a wooden board. The background, shades of gray, is entirely bare.

Warm yellow light further softens the horror of the scene. Both dagger on the floor and wound in the breast are barely visible in the shadow. In fact, emerging from a gray-white turban, the dead man's face--eyes closed, mouth partly smiling--appears calm, as in a gentle sleep. The inscription on the side of a wooden block makeshift desk reads "À Marat/David."

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This book presents the "War of Attempted Secession" through the eyes of America's great poet. It consists of letters, dispatches, articles, and prose selections from Specimen Days (1882), Whitman's quasi-autobiography. In addition, all of Whitman's Civil War poems are included, some interspersed through the text and others collected in an Appendix.

The editor has arranged this material into 14 thematic chapters, beginning with "an introductory section in which Whitman discusses the general character of the Civil War" and including chapters containing material on his visits to the front, life in Washington during the War, letters to his mother, his admiration for Lincoln, and other topics.

Of particular interest is "The Great Army of the Wounded," a chapter composed of dispatches to the New York Times and Brooklyn Eagle, in which Whitman describes the military hospitals surrounding Washington and his own work as a volunteer nurse, scribe, and friendly visitor. In "Dear Love of Comrades," he presents a number of "specimen" cases of sick or wounded soldiers. "O My Soldiers, My Veterans" consists of letters written to soldiers, or for soldiers to their families. Another chapter, "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," presents Whitman's positive assessment of black regiments serving in the Union Army.

Many of the war poems appear in topically appropriate chapters; among the most effective of these are "A Twilight Song," "Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice," "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing," "Dirge for Two Veterans," "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors," "O Captain! My Captain," and The Wound Dresser (see annotation in this database).

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I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. So opens the first part of "Notes from Underground," in which the narrator describes his character and psychological states. He is a low ranking public official, 40 years old, who lives alone in a small room. When he received a small inheritance, he immediately quit his job and now spends his time ruminating about who he is and what his life means.

This narrator does not simply accept the laws of nature. He dislikes "the fact that two and two makes four." He realizes that he cannot break down the wall of nature "by battering my head against it," but nonetheless "I am not going to resign myself to it simply because it is a stone wall and I am not strong enough." (p. 12) He is proud of never having begun or finished anything. (p. 17) In fact, "what man needs is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead." (p. 23)

The narrator is "underground" because he has chosen not to participate, not to accomplish, not to interact, not even to justify his non-participation in "ordinary" life. Yet, he is bored, and so he chooses to occupy himself by writing these notes.

The second part is less rumination and more narrative, as the protagonist describes some seminal events in his life. When he was a young clerk, he was a loner with no friends. One day he decided to visit Simonov, an old school acquaintance, who happened at the time to be planning a dinner with some friends to honor another friend, Zverkov, who had done well in the military. The protagonist awkwardly invited himself to this dinner, despite having no money to pay for it, and later, after being thoroughly obnoxious and insulting his hosts, he followed them to a brothel, where he encountered a whore named Liza and conned her into thinking that he cared for her.

When she appeared at his apartment a few days later, he angrily told her that the "fine sentiments" were all false: "I was laughing at you!" When Liza then ran away, the narrator became agitated and tried to follow, but quickly dropped the idea. "Would I not begin to hate her, perhaps even tomorrow, just because I had kissed her feet today? Would I give her happiness? Had I not recognized that day, for the hundredth time, what I was worth?" (p. 113) At this point he breaks off, saying that he chooses not to write any further notes form underground.

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This is one of the two dozen studies of patients with right-brain disorders that make up Sacks's volume The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The nineteen-year-old Rebecca has significant physical and mental defects (her IQ is 60 at best), and by conventional neurological standards she is severely impaired, but Sacks discovers that she has moments of being quite in touch and "together" (her word).

The essay tells of Sacks's discovery of Rebecca's poetic expression and spiritual qualities, and of her self-awareness, in planes unknown to standard neurological and psychiatric categories. Sacks is broadly critical of psychological and neurological testing as constituting a "defectology" that is blind to important human qualities. He warmly recommends music and story-telling, both as modes of understanding and also as narrative therapies that work by ignoring the defects and speaking to the soul.

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