Summary:

The narrator distinguishes between madness and sanity: the beliefs of the majority constitute sanity, whereas those who dissent are considered insane.

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The narrator recounts a day sitting through an astronomy lecture, listening to the astronomer's dry mathematical descriptions of the stars, and watching their arrangement into charts, columns, and figures. During the lecture he becomes "tired and sick" and wanders off into the "mystical moist night-air" to silently gaze up at the stars.

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The philosophy student Kovrin is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His doctor suggests a rest in the country and so Kovrin decides to visit his childhood friend Tanya Pesotsky on her father's estate. While there he tells Tanya the legend of the black monk: a desert monk whose image has been reflected in mirages for a thousand years and who will soon return in the flesh.

One day in the garden, the black monk appears to the young man. This gives him joy and energy, even though he realizes that it is a hallucination. "What harm is in it?" Kovrin asks himself. As the summer goes on, the black monk continues to visit. Kovrin asks Tanya to marry him, they wed and move to the city. At one point Kovrin's hallucinations and disordered thinking overwhelm him; he agrees to medical treatment which evidently cures his mental disorder. Yet, his feelings of energy and creativity also disappear, along with the black monk.

Kovrin realizes that he hates his wife and she hates him. She returns to her father and his beloved garden, while Kovrin receives a professorship, a position he never actually takes because he is too ill--he has begun to hemorrhage from the lungs. Soon after receiving news of his father-in-law's death, he sees the black monk again and dies of a hemorrhage.

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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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The poet as a young girl sits in a dentist's office in Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting for her Aunt Consuelo, who is being treated. She looks at the exotic photographs in National Geographic magazines--volcanoes, pith helmets, "babies with pointed heads," and "black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire." The girl hears her aunt cry out in pain. Suddenly, she has a revelation, "you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them," a person. In some mysterious way, they were all bound together, even the women with "those awful hanging breasts."[99 lines]

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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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Summary:

Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) and his wife (Rene Russo) are both working for a federal infectious disease laboratory, but their marriage is on the rocks. A mysterious lethal illness, remarkably like Ebola fever, breaks out at various sites in America, all eventually connected to a pet shop that received a monkey from an illegal smuggling operation. Most cases are immediately isolated and contained, but a town in California develops an epidemic of the new disease.

The lab is called in and the military enforces a strict quarantine that divides families and prevents anyone from leaving the area. One worker dies quickly and Sam's wife falls ill. The crass General Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) is convinced that the nation can be saved only by the annihilation of the town by a gigantic bomb.

A plane sets out on the gruesome mission. Meanwhile, Hoffman leaps from a helicopter onto the cargo ship where the sailor-smuggler has just died leaving a photo of the monkey carrier. Sam makes a televised appeal for help locating the cute but dangerous, little monkey; a terrified mother responds and the creature is snatched from the arms of her child.

With military snipers in hot pursuit, Sam returns to the town, radioing the baffled bomber pilots with a barrage of reasons why they should ditch their mission of destruction. He puts the tiny monkey to work producing anti-sera and vaccines, which--in only a matter of minutes!--rescue the town, his wife, and his marriage. The pilots disobey orders and dump their bomb in the sea.

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In 1988, having suffered for years from major depression and borderline personality disorder, and now also showing symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the twenty-six-year-old Lauren Slater is prescribed a new drug: Prozac. In this "diary," a series of meditations and progress reports on her experience, Slater traces ten years on Prozac, providing a remarkable before-and-after picture of the drug's effects.

She is "hobbled" by her illness: has dropped out of college, has been fired from most jobs, has been hospitalized five times. By the end of the book, she has received a doctorate from Harvard, has a successful career as writer, teacher, and psychologist, and is in a happy marriage.

Despite these unquestionable positives, Slater is ambivalent about the drug, describing the shock of becoming "normal," of being assaulted by health. She describes the sexual dysfunction, her anxiety about losing the need and ability to write the kind of poetry she had written before, and the terrifying moment when the drug suddenly stops working, and she must confront the possibility that it may not be a reliable and permanent solution.

She comes to fear that, healthy, she is no longer herself but something the drug has created. At the same time, though, it is only because of the drug that she is even able to ask these questions. Finally, she thanks her doctor for his ambiguous gift: she has become like a beautiful fish, her "skin all silver," her "mouth pierced" on Prozac, "this precious hook."

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Summary:

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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Summary:

By most accounts Dr. Sam Abelman is a failure in life, an irascible old general practitioner who lives in the same grimy Brooklyn neighborhood he has always lived in. He is truculent and tactless, an easy mark for the young specialists who steal his patients. One night a bunch of hoodlums drop a battered young woman on his doorstep. Abelman's nephew, a reporter, publishes a news item about the incident, "Doctor Saves Raped Girl."

Meanwhile, Woody Thrasher, vice president of an advertising agency, is looking for a new type of television show to sell to one of his clients. He comes up with Americans USA, a candid look at "ordinary" Americans who are just doing their jobs, but in an extraordinary way. He decides that Sam Abelman would be the ideal first subject.

Thrasher, a young, high-powered executive, meets Abelman, the last angry man, who summarizes his view on life by saying, "The bastards just won't let you live." The doctor's practice is declining, he can't afford to retire or move away, and the local people certainly don't seem to love him. They don't show gratitude for his services. They don't pay their bills. Many of them consider him a racist, and incompetent to boot. Abelman is clearly not a good candidate for "doctor of the year."

Yet, Thrasher soon finds himself intrigued. Abelman spends hours working in his miniature vegetable garden and reading Henry David Thoreau. He is a brilliant diagnostician, a devoted husband, and an endless campaigner against the "galoots" who think the world owes them a living. Abelman takes aim at "galoots" wherever he finds them, and he finds them everywhere.

The novel interweaves these two men's developing relationship, as Abelman agrees to do the show and Thrasher works to sell it to his bosses, with incidents from Abelman's earlier life. When it turns out that Americans USA will award its subjects their "heart's desire" (in Sam Abelman's case a new house), the doctor declines to go on, refusing to accept "charity" and claiming that Thrasher "tried to crap me up." In the end he agrees to do the show, but suffers a massive heart attack and dies.

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