Summary:

Until their father abandoned the family and moved to California, Toby Malone, his older brother, Jake, and his younger brother Eli have a close, easy relationship with each other and their parents.  After his departure, and their move into a small condo, Jake begins to associate with drug users and dealers.  He becomes secretive, his behavior becomes erratic, and Toby, from whose point of view the story is told, is torn between loyalty to Jake and guilt at keeping secrets from his mother, who, coping with her own losses, is preoccupied and somewhat depressed.

For a while Toby runs interference, finding ways to care for his younger brother, mask the trouble from his mother, and cover Jake's tracks.  His own stability is preserved in part by a comfortable, cordial relationship with an older man in whose store he helps, and who helps him find baseball cards he treasures.  Finally, when Jake is apprehended and sentenced to rehab, Toby is relieved of his conflict and able to enter into a more authentic relationship with all his family members.  This new stage includes releasing pointless fantasies about his father's coming back and rescuing the family from their troubles.

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South Africans, Paul and Andrea, are lovers living in France. Paul is fiftyish and white; Andrea is thirty and “coloured.” He has just asked her to marry him. She travels to Provence ostensibly to research sites for a film to be based on Paul’s endlessly forthcoming novel about fourteenth-century plague. But the real reason for the journey is to test her feelings about his proposal—she is leaning to ‘yes.’

As five days roll by, she relives the trajectory of her life: her impoverished parents, her thwarted education, her angry, imprisoned brother, and the previous affair with Brian, a British historian with whom she was captured ‘in flagrante,’ sent to trial, found guilty, and offered prison or voluntary exile. Brian and Andrea left South Africa together, but their relationship eventually crumbled. She had trouble understanding his passion for the past and his love of detail.

In Provence, Andrea avoids places that Paul had wanted her to go, finding strength in solitude and independence. But that feeling is shattered when he asks her to rescue their penniless, black friend, Mandla, an anti-apartheid activist who has been betrayed by a comrade who turned out to be a spy.

Andrea doesn’t like Mandla, his sanctimonious accusations, arrogance, and probing. He is a racist and a male chauvinist, given to violence. But his constant questioning finally unleashes deeper memories of the shocking abuses of her life in apartheid South Africa—memories she has suppressed or attempted to blame on class struggle rather than racial intolerance. She tries to provoke his empathy with the terrible tragedy of the long ago plague. He resists, being concerned far more with the present, but he relents a little and begins to see racism as a plague and walls as feeble, futile attempts to exclude others.

Andrea falls for Mandla, makes love with him near the plague wall, and decides to refuse Paul and return to South Africa. But Mandla rejects a future with her because he wants no vulnerability in his struggle. He is killed in the night by a car. Was the death deliberate? accidental? suicide? Andrea leaves anyway.

In a short second part, Paul writes to Andrea of his own growing doubts about their future together despite his love.

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Thirteen-year-old Matilda lives on a south Pacific island with copper mines. Rebels and other more official warriors are tearing the place apart. A blockade has made resources scarce and communication impossible; fathers are absent at distant work. Along with everything else, the local school collapses. 

Mr. Watts, the only island white man, offers to take over the education of the children, but he has no experience, few materials and just one book: his treasured copy of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. He begins reading a few pages every day. Captivated by the story, the children repeat it to their mothers when they go home each night.  

Matilda believes that she loves Mr. Dickens more than anyone else and she is both bemused and irritated by her stern mother's suspicion of the strange, possibly godless, white man and her feigned disinterest in Pip. Parents are invited to the school to pass on their own expectations about learning. Students accept these moments with pride and embarrassment.

The political chaos deepens, homes are destroyed, and the book vanishes. But Watts (nicknamed Mr. Pip) turns the loss to advantage by helping the students to recover fragments in a lengthy effort of collective recollection.

The ever menacing warriors return. Little more than frightened children in an incomprehensible conflict, they indulge in senseless brutality and killing. With courage absorbed from her mother, Matilda escapes, rediscovers her father, and finds a scholarly future—a life she embraces because of Mr. Dickens and Mr. Pip.

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Triggered in part by a trip to the Galápagos Islands, the author interweaves two parallel narratives: Darwin's "journey toward evolution" along with the related work of Alfred Russel Wallace; and the author's own journey through life, partially disabled and dependent on the specially fitted shoes that help him to walk.  Together these two narratives develop "all I have come to understand about chance and change, fear and transformation, variation and cultural context, ideas about the body that question the definition and existence of difference in all of our lives" (xvii).

Born with an unnamed congenital condition in which his fibulae are absent along with other lower limb "abnormalities," Fries underwent five major reconstructive surgeries as a child, but after those, what helped him most were special shoes that were fitted to his special body, assisting him to walk.  As an adult, however, he begins to experience back pain and knee problems.  The memoir relates, both in flashback, and in the present day, Fries's quest for a proper pair of shoes that will help him avoid yet another surgery -- the shoes he has been wearing are 20 years old and no longer do the job.  We meet Dr. Mendotti, who treated him like a peculiar specimen and offered a pharmacologic way out of his pain; shoemaker Eneslow, in a dingy Union Square office, whose shoes not only fit Fries well, but were festive in appearance -- "I felt both normal and special" (17); other practitioners of orthotics who try but fail to construct shoes that relieve Fries's pain, and finally, the gifted, patient orthoticist, Tom Coburn, who persists until he is able to provide shoes that work.  The shoes have been adapted for Fries's body, just as man has constructed adaptations that allow him to live in a variety of climates and circumstances.  Conversely, Fries, convinced he "can adapt to the circumstances in which my body places me (169)," draws from Darwin, whom he quotes: "individual differences are highly important for us, as they afford materials for natural selection to accumulate" (169).
 
Darwinian connections are invoked throughout the narrative.  The peculiar configuration of Fries's feet and shoes help him to ascend a series of mountain ladders while his partner, Ian -- who usually has to assist Fries with such physical maneuvers -- suddenly becomes fearful of the height and exposure;  back problems might have developed even without his congenital abnormalities because evolution of the capacity to walk upright included the tendency toward back pain; the role of chance in natural selection and the role of chance in the physical fact of congenital conditions; the positive role that his partner Ian's attention deficit disorder (ADD) could have played in the days of hunter-gatherers and the cultural context in which ADD is now considered to be "abnormal."
 
Fries discusses his fears -- both rational and irrational -- as well as his awareness of stigma, difference, and sameness.  The context of these discussions is usually a reminiscence about vacations in far-flung countries (Thailand, the Galápagos, Bali, Alaska, the Canadian Rockies) and physically challenging domestic locales (a Colorado River raft trip, the Beehive Mountain in Acadia National Park).  He  occasionally brings into the discussion his homosexuality, especially as his physical deformity affected sexual encounters.  The relationship between Fries and Ian is woven throughout the memoir as one of understanding, mutual need and benefit.  As the memoir ends, Fries worries about the likelihood he will need a wheelchair, but is at the same time gathering confidence in his ability to ride the Easy Flyer bicycle that Ian has discovered at the local bike shop.

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At the request of a German editor, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) began his autobiography at the age of 67. His granddaughter and editor, Nora Barlow, tells us that he revised it over several years.

Darwin remembers little about his mother who died when he was 8, but talks at length about his forceful physician father, who measured 6 foot 2 inches, and weighed over 336 pounds. His father's success guaranteed that Charles would never have to work for a living. Darwin was a naughty boy schooled in humaneness and manners by his loving sisters. Early on, he showed a passion for collecting, mostly beetles, but also coins, shells, and minerals. He hated boarding school; he enjoyed running in the open air and shooting snipes with his dogs. He quotes his father's characterization of him as a young boy: "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family" (28).

As a medical student at Edinburgh University, he witnessed operations without anesthesia which caused him to revolt against his father's wish that he become a doctor; he couldn't take the sight of blood.  At Cambridge, he found most of his classes and professors dull, except for his botany professor, John Stevens Henslow, his mentor and hiking companion. The paternal plan for him to become a clergyman foundered at Cambridge, as Darwin questioned the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England.

From 1831, he sailed with Capt. Fitz-Roy on board  The Beagle for 5 years and 3 days (again, against his father's wishes). He quarrelled with  Fitz-Roy whose mood swings required Darwin's tact. They disagreed about slavery, FitzRoy defending it, and Darwin abominating it. He carried Lyell's Principles of Geology with him, read Milton, and collected numerous specimens which he sent back to Britain.

28 months after his return, Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. The marriage was happy and produced 10 children.

In the chapter on his religious beliefs, Darwin gives 4 reasons for believing the Old Testament to be false; as he has studied the laws of nature, he has ceased to believe in miracles. He rejects Bishop Paley's argument for intelligent design: "Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws" (87). The Christian god is cruel, as he causes innocent animals to suffer and condemns non-believers to hell. Darwin confesses he does not understand "the mystery of the beginning of all things" (94), calling himself an agnostic. He outlines the great Victorian men he has known, though his ill health has long  prevented him from traveling or seeing friends. He discusses his publications, including Origin of Species, stating he did not care whether he or Wallace got the credit for the theory of evolution. He attributes his success to his moderate abilities. He has been methodical, industrious, and commonsensical.

The appendix includes Darwin's list of pro and con arguments about marriage, Mrs. Darwin's papers on religion, and a short chapter on his illnesses.

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In his debut novel, Dr. Khaled Hosseini tells a tale that begins in his homeland, Afghanistan, and ends in his adopted country, the United States. Amir, son of a wealthy Pashtun merchant, narrates the story. Amir and his father, Baba, are attended by two Hazara servants, Ali and his hare-lipped son, Hassan. Amir and Hassan are friends, but Amir is troubled by a guilty conscience over multiple slights and sly insults aimed at Hassan. The burden of guilt intensifies over an incident at a kite-flying contest when Amir is twelve years old.

Kite flying in Afghanistan is an intricate affair involving glass-embedded string that contestants use to slice the strings of other kites. The winner is not only the one with the last kite flying, but also the one who catches the last cut kite--the kite runner. At the close of the contest, Amir witnesses the traumatization of his friend Hassan, the finest kite runner, at the hands of an evil youth, Assef. Too shamed to help Hassan, Amir is nearly swallowed by his cowardice: the rest of the story follows the consequences of his guilt.

Amir and Baba emigrate to the United States during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but Amir, as a young adult, returns during the Taliban regime in order to redeem himself and help Hassan's son. The story is filled with plot twists and revelations of secrets and hidden relationships, which enable Amir to confront some of his shortcomings. The oppression, torture, and murder of Afghanis by the Taliban are graphically depicted.

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Ethiopia, 1954. Twin boys conjoined at the head survive a surgical separation and a gruesome C-section delivery. Their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, does not. The Carmelite nun, a native of India, dies in the same place where she worked as a nurse - the operating room of a small hospital in Addis Ababa. The facility is dubbed Missing Hospital, and it is staffed by some remarkable people.

Thomas Stone is a British general surgeon. The only thing that he loves more than medicine is Sister Praise. When she dies during childbirth, he has a meltdown - abruptly fleeing the hospital and leaving Africa. Although Thomas Stone is the father of the twins, he blames the babies for the nun's death. Decades later, he is working at a prestigious medical center in Boston where he specializes in hepatic surgery and research on liver transplantation. The twins are raised by two physicians at Missing Hospital - Dr. Ghosh and Dr. Hemlatha (Hema) - who get married. Hema is an obstetrician-gynecologist. Ghosh is an internist who becomes the hospital's surgeon by necessity after Thomas Stone departs.

The fate of the twin boys, Marion Stone and Shiva Stone, is sculpted by their experiences at Missing Hospital and the growing pains of Ethiopia. The African nation is full of possibilities and mayhem. Both boys are highly intelligent and unusually bonded. Shiva is eccentric and empathic. Although he never attends medical school, Ghosh and Hema train him. Shiva becomes a world authority on treating vaginal fistulas. Marion narrates the story. He is repeatedly hurt by love. The girl of his dreams, Genet, opts to have her first sexual encounter with Shiva. Genet plays a role in hijacking an airplane and rebels against the Ethiopian government. Although innocent, Marion comes under suspicion because of her actions. He escapes the country for his own safety.

Like his father, Marion lands in America. He completes his residency training as a trauma surgeon in New York. He locates his biological father but reconciliation is difficult for both men. Genet has also come to America. She shows up at Marion's apartment, and they have sexual intercourse. Genet exposes him to tuberculosis and Hepatitis B. Marion delevelops liver failure due to hepatitis. He is going to die. Shiva and Hema travel to New York to be with Marion. Shiva proposes an experimental treatment for his brother - a living donor liver transplantation. After all, there is no better organ donor than an identical twin. Thomas Stone performs the operation along with one of Marion's coleagues. The surgery is successful. Then Shiva has bleeding in his brain and dies. Marion returns to Ethiopia and Missing Hospital. Half a century removed from his birth, Marion is back at home and still conected to his twin brother. The lobe of liver donated by Shiva is functioning perfectly.

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The unusual title is borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne's story, "The Custom House," to suggest a shift in fortune when immigrants "strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."  Set almost entirely in the United States (the unaccustomed earth), eight separate stories are connected most obviously by cultural dissonances affecting characters who are Indian or have Indian parents.  Three of the stories, however, are linked by a strong narrative connection that is unexpected, profound, and unforgettable.

For Indian readers, the narratives describe complexities about migration patterns, cultural issues, alienation, and generational differences. The stories deal with well-educated children of immigrants who become offspring their parents barely recognize.  For other readers, the stories reveal situations about families and customs that are strangely familiar, especially those stories dealing with relationships between parents and children.
 
The forces of globalization have created and accelerated shifts that can seem staggering to all parents intent on preserving cultural patterns and traditions. Whether Indian or not, most parents experience a sense of alienation while watching their children flourish in a world that increasingly appears unfamiliar and foreign.

Not surprisingly, the stories concern strains and challenges affecting mixed relationships and/or mixed marriages and stresses on disapproving and disappointed parents, while others focus on children succumbing to drugs and alcohol(for the latter, see annotation of "Only Goodness").  All deal with some kind of emotional loss, but provide connections to feelings experienced by children and their parents in life's quiet and more kinetic negotiations.
 
The first story is about Ruma, a well-educated woman who lives in Seattle with her work-alcoholic American husband, and child, Akash.  Generational and cultural contrasts are revealed in overt and more subtle ways when her recently widowed father arrives for a short visit. Even though Ruma's complete assimilation into her non-Indian home as well as her on-going worries about her father's loneliness are major considerations, another story thread is spun, one that quietly reveals the father's thoughts about himself and a new relationship made recently during a vacation in Europe. Ruma's assumptions about her father, his loneliness, his possible dependency on her, and the Seattle vacation as a possible signal for relocating to her household turn out to be entirely wrong. 
 
The last three stories follow a boy, Kaushik, and girl, Hema, into adulthood.  In the first story, "Once in a Lifetime," Hema recalls her first memory of Kaushik when he was 9 and she was 6. The occasion was a farewell party for Kaushik's parents who were returning from the United States to live in Calcutta. The mothers, who grew up in Calcutta, but met in Cambridge, Massachusetts had become very close and were saddened by this separation.

Seven years pass before Kaushik‘s parents return to the Boston area and stay with Hema's family. Hema found the now 16-year old young man appealing, but brooding and totally uninterested in her. Even though Hema expected Kaushik to be Indian-like in behavior, he was more Americanized than she was. That the family had flown first-class shocked Hema's conservative family as did their new smoking and moderate drinking habits.

After a long search, and to the relief of Hema's parents, Kaushik's family found a  modern house on the North Shore.  Before they moved to their new home, Kaushik surprised Hema with confidential information-- his family had left India to seek treatment in Boston for his mother's breast cancer.  All medical efforts had been unsuccessful and his mother had only a short time to live.  Hema promised to keep this disclosure secret and grieved for the woman she had come to admire and love.
 
The second story in the link, "Year's End," is narrated by Kaushik.  With the opening line, "I did not attend my father's wedding," readers know that Kaushik‘s mother has died.  His father, in Calcutta for a visit, had married Chitra, a woman with two young daughters, and all would be returning to the North Shore house to live. Most of the chapter recounts the ordeal of the mother‘s dying, Kaushik‘s tremendous sense of loss, and the loneliness experienced by him at Swarthmore College.  No mention is made of Hema by the desolate narrator except to remember he had hated every day spent under her parents' roof, but later had come to think of that time with nostalgia.  

"Going Ashore" brings Hema and Kaushik together in Rome where she has a study grant and a visiting lectureship and he is on vacation from his work as an award-winning photo journalist.  Hema's parents have arranged for her to marry Navin in Calcutta.  Navin has accepted a teaching position at MIT. Until her unexpected reunion with Kaushik and the intense love affair that follows, neither had experienced any real connection with another person.  The story about them in Rome seems to represent an independence from the cultural forces that have shaped their lives, but this independence is short lived.  Ultimately, she is unable to set aside the expectations imposed by her parents.  The consequences of their final separation are more than any reader might imagine.

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Based on the memoir by British writer Blake Morrison, who is played in the film by Colin Firth, the story unfolds through Blake's eyes.  Blake's father Arthur (Jim Broadbent) is rapidly dying of cancer, cared for at home by Blake's mother, Kim (Juliet Stevenson).  Blake's parents are both physicians.  Blake is extremely ambivalent toward his father and reluctantly goes back to his childhood home to visit the dying man.  As his father lies dying Blake hashes out within himself his conflicted feelings toward his father -- long-standing anger, contempt, guilt, occasional grudging admiration.  The film flashes back and forth between the present and Blake's memories of the past.

As seen through Blake's eyes, his father is bombastic, overbearing, a deceiving and self-deceiving individual.  Blake recalls numerous instances where his father called him "fathead," barged unannounced into his room, humiliated him in front of others, competed with him for the attention of young women, and disparaged his choice of career as a writer.  Blake is deeply wounded by the knowledge that his father has been carrying on a romance with Aunt Beaty (Sarah Lancashire ) behind his mother's back -- although his mother is painfully aware of the infidelity.  In addition to recalling various humiliating and annoying situations with his father, Blake is enveloped in memories of his first sexual relationship with the family's maid and even makes a brief pass at her in the present, after his father's funeral.  He is so fixated on his obsessions -- with his first love and with his father -- that when his wife speaks with him on the telephone, he is distant and hostile toward her.
 
Blake's mother nurses her dying husband while Blake hovers in the background, hoping for an opportunity to talk to his father while he is still lucid, in what is bound to be a futile attempt at having a revelatory discussion about their fraught relationship -- such a discussion is bound to be futile because Arthur does not admit to his faults and even as he is on his deathbed, seeks reassurance from his wife that they had a happy life together.

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This book chronicles a tortured parenthood during the birth and brief life of a severely brain-damaged female infant, Silvie. Doctors predict that the child will live only a few days but instead she survives for seven months. The story is told in first person by the mother, beginning with her arduous labor during a home delivery in the presence of an experienced midwife and the family physician. The baby does not cry when she is born and turns blue even with oxygen that the doctor administers. An ambulance is summoned; "a bigger, better oxygen machine" restores the baby's color and she is brought to a hospital neonatal intensive care unit where she is artificially ventilated and fed.

In the hospital Silvie "fails" all the tests of normalcy. The doctors recommend removing artificial ventilation. "I feared, even more than I feared her death I think (and harder to admit), that they would remove the oxygen pump and the baby would live on and on and never be able to do anything at all" (14). Yet when the child does in fact breathe independently, "I took the fact that she could sustain her own breathing to mean that the baby wanted to live. It was all right to love her" (15). A few days later, however, the medical team concludes that there is nothing further they can do for the baby, that the parents should take the child home, where she will likely die within a couple of days. Upon being prodded, one physician suggests the parents give her an overdose of phenobarbital, which she is receiving for continual epileptic seizures.

At home, the parents feed Silvie by tube, medicate her, change her diapers, hold her, and learn from a friend how to swaddle her. The child never cries, does not focus her eyes on anything, rarely responds to sound or touch, and gains no weight. Whatever random responsiveness there seems to be gives the author a sense of motherhood: "I was able to survive because of my faith in these intermittent chance meetings, believing that Silvie did know when I was here and that I was holding her close in a way that meant love" (37). The parents brace themselves for Silvie's death. The husband's sister visits and councils them to actively put an end to Silvie's life, which they refuse to do. But they do not plan to take extra measures (CPR) if Silvie seems to be dying at home and when they articulate this to a social worker whom they consult to obtain respite care, it becomes clear that she would report them to Child Protective Services.

The husband quits his job as a residential counselor of emotionally disturbed teenagers to do part-time carpentry work -- he is too preoccupied to care about other people's problems. When a friend accidentally breaks the phenobarbital bottle, the parents together with the family physician decide to see how Silvie will get along without the drug. To their amazement, the baby appears slightly more alert and is able to suck from a bottle -- no more feeding tube required. But the husband reminds his wife, "The doctors warned us she might do this. This is the one and only thing she can ever learn. They said when this happened to other parents they started to believe that the baby was getting better" (59).

The parents live in limbo, attempt to live a "normal" life. When Silvie starts to lose weight at age 4 months, the doctor advises to resume tube feeding; they don't see the point, but when hospital physicians use the word, "murder," and threaten to "take over" Silvie's care, the parents relent. The baby lives but "it was the sameness of Silvie that drove you crazy . . . She slept and woke, but was awake that much different? She did not change, she did not change. Her sameness was a stone I wore, an emblem of failure, failed life" (96).

The final act for Silvie begins when the author's mother-in-law is dying of cancer in New York and a decision is made to leave the baby at home in California for several days in the care of a retired nurse. The nurse has been shown how to do the tube feeding, but while the parents are in New York she experiments with spoon feeding, then discontinues tube feeding for three days before the parents return. The parents see that Silvie has deteriorated in their absence and resume tube feeding. For the remaining couple of months the parents wait, investigate institutionalizing Silvie, and finally determine that "the way we loved Silvie meant we loved her enough to let her die" at home, with "a certain amount of fluid and nourishment for comfort, but a gradual withdrawal of excessive food. Replaced with a lot of touching and holding, stroking and whispering" (122). Silvie dies and the author is four months pregnant with the baby she and her husband have decided not to abort.

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