Summary:

Geek Love is the saga of a traveling carnival, the owners of which try to save it from financial failure by using ingested chemicals and toxins to create the birth of amazing freaks for the show. The outcome is a family that is both proud and vain about its specialness. The narrative unfolds the intricacies of greed and jealousy that tear the family asunder, resulting in the deaths of some members, the madness of others, and the escape of one.

It is Olympia, the hunchback albino dwarf, who lives on to tell the story of the Binewski clan. Central to the heyday of the carnival is Doc P, a physician of questionable credentials who performs bizarre operations in the traveling hospital that moves with the carnival. The story moves relentlessly toward a climax and denouement that is sufficiently unimaginable to be consistent with the cast of characters.

View full annotation

Summary:

This five-line poem poses a direct question of distributive justice to a mother faced with scarce resources. "Indian Poem" asks the mother to decide how she will divide what little she has among her children. She must choose between her strong son who has no immediate need, her weak son who is bound to die soon , and her daughter, "who is a girl anyway." The poem presents an imperative choice, but acknowledges that in choosing, the mother will also suffer along with her children.

View full annotation

Summary:

Canadian artist, Robert Pope (d.1992), devoted the last years of his short life to documenting his decade-long experience as a patient with Hodgkin's Disease. Shortly after his diagnosis he was influenced by the 1945 autobiographical novel of Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Pope's early work explored the interconnectedness and pain of individuals bound by an imperfect love, in Smart's case for a married man. After his disease went into remission, he began to paint the patient's perspective on illness, hospitals, visitors, family, and health-care providers in a series of images that suggest the lighting of de la Tour, the photographic immediacy of Doisneau, and the menacing surrealism of de Chirico. His book, Illness and Healing: Images of Cancer (1991), became a bestseller.

View full annotation

Summary:

This collection of poems is a sustained meditation on, and coming to terms with, grief. The speaker's mother has been killed suddenly in an automobile accident and most of the book's first poems deal with the aftermath of her death. For example, in "The Toll Attendant," the speaker describes asking directions to the hospital "where mother's body / may be retrieved at our earliest convenience."

In the title poem, the speaker asks, "And now that she's gone how do we find her-- / especially my small daughters who will eventually recall their grandmother / not as a snapshot in the faults of the mind/ but as the incense in their hair long after the reading of the Lotus Sutra." In thinking about her father's wish to bring back his wife from death, "to retrieve her–", the speaker asks, "what hell is this where each article emits the fragrance of mother's cold cream."

View full annotation

Summary:

John Rodgers is in his last year in high school in a small northern California town where the majority of the townspeople work in the lumber industry. As the youngest son of a father who was a champion athlete, John has always felt pressured by him to excel in his sport of choice, distance running. His father also wants him to put aside his interest in biology--ecologists are the enemy since they threaten his livelihood by protesting clearcutting of redwoods. John can do neither.

In the middle of his senior year he learns that his father has leukemia and is losing ground rapidly. Never having had a comfortable relationship with him, the illness complicates their relationship which soon becomes even more complicated by John's discovery of a rare species of butterfly in the company woods. Knowing it will alienate him not only from his father but from the whole town, he reports the discovery and takes the consequences; his friends beat him up and he runs away. With the help of a sympathetic biology teacher he returns home to find his way to a "separate peace" with his father and a new, complex understanding of the trade-offs between loyalty and responsibility.

View full annotation

Summary:

A retrospective and reflective review of the last weeks in the life of the author's aging mother. Threaded throughout the chronicle of the progressive downhill course of the patient dying of cancer are flashbacks to the earlier relationships among the author, her sister, and their mother. The course of the illness enables the reader to view many of the common problems that inform the doctor-patient, nurse-patient, and parent-child relationship. The narrator, who is an accomplished writer, creates vivid and timely images of the hospital as experienced by the lay person.

View full annotation

Summary:

In a South American town during the early years of this century, a retired doctor long known as an eccentric flatly refuses treatment to victims of a riot. Years later, the doctor hangs himself. For the vengeful town, the issue becomes whether he will receive a proper burial or be allowed to rot in the house where he had lately secluded himself.

This issue becomes the focal point of recollections, from many points of view, of fragments of the doctor's bizarre history. An old military man, who was originally the doctor's sponsor and host, braves the town's anger and forces his family members to help him carry out the burial. As it turns out, no one remembers the outrage apart from a few town officials, and the burial takes place without incident.

View full annotation

Summary:

A young farmer and father of three, Cory Johnson has cobbled together his own corn sheller with old parts and a new electric motor. His four-year-old son Bobby catches a hand in the gears, and Cory can only free him by amputating the hand with a hatchet. Over the next two decades, this accident haunts Cory as a violation of the one condition that had given meaning to his life--his fatherhood.

Although Bobby grows to normal adulthood and manages perfectly well with prosthetics, the fact that neither he nor others will blame Cory only compounds the father's depression. Cory slips inevitably toward madness and, in a gothic conclusion, re-enacts his crime in a way that will ensure punishment the second time.

View full annotation

Summary:

This early 20th century novel is largely a tale of complex family and love relationships. It is the story of two brothers who vie for the love of the same woman, a competition that nearly destroys the men's friendship but that also leads the narrative into adventures on the frontiers of the Canadian Rockies during the building of the transcontinental railroad.

One of the brothers is inspired by a country surgeon to enter medicine and the middle third of the book deals with the physician training system of the time. The reader is introduced to representatives of both the finest and the most immoral of practitioners and practices. Running from his broken love relationship, the newly minted physician travels to the frontier where he assumes a pseudonym and practices medicine in the railroad camps. His work is inspired and he becomes a folk hero.

In a parallel narrative, the second brother, now a minister, also goes west, while grieving the fracture in his relationship with his younger sibling. Neither knows that the other has relocated to the Rockies. The remainder of the story details the doctor's work and eventual reunion with his estranged brother.

View full annotation

Summary:

A woman, Rose, describes her childhood during the depression as she struggled with issues of her own identity and her jealousy toward her younger sister, Sophie, who suffers from cerebral palsy and seizures. Rose watches as Sophie is born, as her parents argue, as Sophie is held closely by their mother during her seizures, and as Sophie is given two birthday parties each year. She fantasizes about how life might be if her sister were dead, and imagines her sister hanging from a rack like the animals at the slaughterhouse. Finally, she discovers that Sophie actually needs her and loves her.

View full annotation