Summary:

Lenny's development from childhood to adolescence concurs with India's independence from Britain and the partitioning of India into India and Pakistan. The interwoven plots give each other substantial meaning. Partly because Lenny's family are Parsees, a religious and ethnic minority that remained relatively neutral in post-Partition religious conflicts, she has access to people of all ethnicities and religions, both within Lahore and in other locales. More significantly, she has access to a wide variety of viewpoints both pre-and post-Partition through her Ayah, a beautiful woman whose suitors are ethnically and religiously diverse.

Lenny's passionate love of Ayah and the loss of innocence that accompanies their changing relationship through the Partition is an energetic center to the plot. Lenny's relationships with her mother, her powerful godmother, and her sexually invasive cousin are also important to the novel. Lenny's polio forms a significant early narrative thread. Other minor but compelling subplots include Lenny's parents' changing relationship, the murder of a British official, and the child marriage of the much-abused daughter of one of Lenny's family's servants.

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Vanya and Uncle Nicolai, two orderlies in a morgue, are preparing for funeral the body of Trepov ("Known everywhere simply as Trepov" (63), a hated officer because of whom "more [Russian] people were murdered than absolutely necessary." Trepov is the pawn of "the Little Father" (64); both very well may be cruel administrators of an invading force, not necessarily Russians themselves, although this is not clear.

What is clear is that Vanya, the younger orderly, despises Trepov. After finishing the dressing of the cadaver in military finery, replete with "all those gilt-enameled medals" (64). Vanya suddenly closes the door, to Uncle Nicolai’s bewilderment. Even more surprising is Vanya’s determined slapping of Trepov’s face three times. With tacit approval from Uncle Nicolai, Vanya then kicks Trepov. Finally, Vanya slaps, with all his strength "the corpse’s face again. Now we can go, he stammered, his face flushed with the thrill of it." (65)

Vanya goes to bed thinking about the son his wife is expecting (since there was no ultrasound between 1908 and 1912 when Csáth most likely wrote this story, this detail remains mysterious) and how he will boast to him about "that day’s doings." And then he falls fast asleep, "breathing evenly, deeply, like all healthy people" (65).

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In this autobiographical poem, the poet describes with tongue-in-cheek her status in a Mexican-American family as seen from her father’s point of view. It is clear from the outset that the father is unhappy with his only daughter’s behavior. Unmarried, she has left home to make her own way while her six brothers remain at home. The father accounts for her behavior, and at the same time predicts its consequences, by recalling all the female relatives who ended badly: widowed, in jail, cursed by voodoo, alone. The most "audacious crime[s]" of all, however, is that of "disobeying fathers."

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The speaker is en route by plane from San Antonio to Mexico City to visit Mexican relatives on her father's side of the family. At the airport she had remembered that "in Mexico they don't like hair / under your arms . . . " and is struggling, before landing, to deal with this in the tiny bathroom, with a disposable razor hastily purchased at the airport.

Also before landing she has to negotiate a mix up over declaration forms--"the stewardess . . . has given me the wrong / one assuming I'm Mexican but I am! / and I have to run up the aisle and ask / for a U.S. citizen form instead because / I'm well how do I explain?" When she arrives in Mexico City she is ready for her relatives, "armpits clean as a newborn's soul" and presents herself "like the good girl my father would have them believe I am."

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The story takes place in Jakarta during the last year of Sukarno's presidency. Despite the near collapse of the Indonesian economy, President Sukarno continues to spend money on massive projects and mobilize the nation against foreign imperialists, especially the United States and Britain. The Great Leader has pronounced this "the Year of Living Dangerously."

The main protagonists of the novel are several foreign newsmen, in particular, Hamilton, a newly arrived representative of the Australian Broadcasting Service, and Billy Kwan, a free-lance cameraman, also from Australia. Billy is an achondroplastic dwarf, an intense man whose secret fantasy life includes a belief that dwarfs form a separate race.

Billy's onetime hero, Sukarno, has now led Indonesia to the brink of revolution. Billy befriends Hamilton, to whom he also attributes heroic qualities, and the two become inseparable for a while. However, both Hamilton and Sukarno prove that they have clay feet. Hamilton does this by co-opting Billy's fantasy girlfriend. In the climactic last weeks before the Indonesian coup d'etat, Billy is radicalized and decides to take direct action. Realizing that his course of action may be fatal, Billy tries to publicize Sukarno's misuse of power by unfurling an anti-Sukarno banner from a government building in Jakarta. He is killed in the attempt.

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In 1848 a member of the Irish gentry named Robert Devereaux is convicted of treason and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment for publishing articles that advocate the violent overthrow of English rule in Ireland. This novel is purportedly based on the journal that Devereaux kept during his years as a prisoner (1848 through 1851).

It begins when he is transported from Ireland to Bermuda, where he spends many months in a prison "hulk." The authorities have to handle him carefully, though, because he is both a gentleman and a symbol of Irish resistance. They do not want to have a martyr on their hands. Thus, when Devereaux develops severe asthma in Bermuda, they send him to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), where he is given a "Ticket-of-Leave"; i. e. he is allowed to live as he wishes in the colony, provided he adheres to certain restrictions and agrees not to attempt escape.

Once in Van Diemen's Land, Devereaux is reunited with other prominent political prisoners. He also meets and falls in loves with Katherine, an Irish Catholic woman, far lower in social class. (Devereaux is a member of the land owning Protestant Ascendancy.)

To be close to Katherine, Devereaux buys a hop farm with an English prisoner named Thomas Langford. The lovers intend to escape to New York together, but Katherine is pregnant. She dies shortly after delivering a healthy son. The despondent Devereaux eventually escapes as the journal ends.

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Jimmie Blacksmith is the son of a white man and an Aboriginal woman in late 19th century New South Wales. A Methodist minister teaches him Christian ideals and Western ambition. Thus, he sets out to make a life for himself in the cash economy and to marry a white woman, who he believes is carrying his child.

For a long time Jimmie quietly overcomes one barrier after another, and calmly accepts the continuous taunting and humiliation of Christian whites, who believe that Aboriginal people are dirt. However, he finally snaps. Exploited by his boss and betrayed by his wife, he simply cannot take it anymore. Jimmie then goes on a killing spree that seems to confirm the whites' worst fears.

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In the mid-19th Century, a teenage prophetess named Nongqawuse preached salvation for the Xhosa people. If the people would slaughter all of their cattle and burn all of their crops, the spirits of their ancestors would rise and drive their oppressors (the English colonizers) into the sea. The ancestors would also resurrect the cattle and restore the crops. A large percentage of the Xhosa ("Believers") adopted this new religion, destroyed their livelihood, and initiated many years of disease and starvation. The Xhosa nation might well have been wiped out, but for the fact that some of the people ("Unbelievers") rejected these prophecies and did not destroy their crops and cattle.

These historical events serve as the cornerstone of The Heart of Redness, which presents two intertwined fictional narratives: one that occurs in the time of Nongqawuse and a second narrative that takes place in Qolorha, a Xhosa village in present-day South Africa. In the novel the conflict between Believers and Unbelievers has persisted through the "Middle Generations" and continues to the present. Believers claim that the prophecies of Nongqawuse would have come true, if only all of the Xhosa people had destroyed their farms and cattle. The ancestors failed to return because of the unbelief of a portion of the people.

Unbelievers argue that the folly of the original Believers led to decades of suffering and a strengthening of the English colonizers. This traditional conflict is reflected today in their attitudes toward economic development. Developers want to build a large casino and resort complex near the village. Unbelievers support the proposal because it will bring jobs and money to the region. Believers are dead set against the proposal because it will destroy their way of life.

Meanwhile, Camagu, who has a Ph.D. in economic development and who returned from exile in 1994 to help build the new South Africa, has moldered for years in Johannesburg, unable to find a job appropriate to his skills. When he meets a young woman who says she is returning home to Qolorha, he spontaneously follows her there. Camagu decides to remain in the village and, against his will, becomes embroiled in the battle between Believers and Unbelievers, as well as love affairs with two women, one from each side of the conflict.

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This is a collection of poems that ranges widely through both the geographical and spiritual worlds. Susan Rich began her career as a human rights activist and Peace Corps volunteer in Niger. She has also worked in South Africa, Bosnia, Gaza, and as a program coordinator for Amnesty, International. Her poems are lyrics of empathy, discontent, and hope, unified by her "Cartographer's Tongue."

From an international medical and health perspective, some of the best of these poems are "Haiti," "The Woman with a Hole in the Middle of Her Face," "In the Language of Maps," "The Toughest Job," "The Beggars," "Sarajevo," "La Verbena Cemetery," "Whatever Happened to the Bodies," and "The Scent of Gasoline."

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In this collection, Judith Arcana brings together her long-standing feminist activism, especially for reproductive health and abortion rights, and her gifts as a poet. Although Arcana's activism dates back to the early seventies, most of the poems in the book were written between 1998 and 2004. They draw from "the lives of women and girls I know or have simply encountered" (xi).

The collection is divided into four sections: "Separating argument from fact," "Information rarely offered," "Don't tell me you didn't know this," and "Here, in the heart of the country." Spoken in first, second, or third person, these poems evoke the myriad individual situations in which women of childbearing age become pregnant, and the trajectories their lives may take as a result.

The title of the collection derives from one of its poems ("What if your mother") and the related, immediately preceding poem, "My father tells me something, 1973" (6-7). Arguing back to those who confront her with, "What if your mother had an abortion? . . . they mean me," the speaker/poet answers, "then I say she did . . . . "What if, what if. / What's the point of asking this phony question?"

From the preceding poem, the reader has learned, along with the speaker listening to her father in 1973, that the poet's mother had an abortion in the Depression era, early in marriage. With this juxtaposition of poems we are introduced early in the book to the complexity of the issues surrounding pregnancy, parenthood, and abortion and to the timeline of a continuing national and personal debate. This complexity is the subject of the collection.

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