Summary:

South African lawyer and leading member of the ANC (African National Congress) during the tumultuous 70s and 80s, lost an arm, sight in one eye, and suffered hearing loss and diminished use of his legs when the bomb planted in his car exploded on April 7, 1988. This book chronicles the accident, his long recovery in a hospital and rehabilitation unit, and the process of re-entering life and politics after such a harrowing experience.

Sachs connects his personal recovery with the emergence of an apartheid-free South Africa and tells his individual story within the context of political struggle. The 2000 edition includes a forward by Desmond Tutu, an introduction by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and a new epilogue by Sachs.

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Born in New Mexico, poet Jimmy Santiago Baca recounts his long saga of imprisonment, beginning in childhood and stretching into adulthood. Throughout this beautifully written memoir, Baca describes his experiences in and outside of prison, and how he moved from being a victim of the system to a survivor through the written word.

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In this poem, the speaker’s mother has lupus [systemic lupus erythematosis], a "disease / of self-attack" where, for example, when the police arrive at a mugging, "they beat up on you / instead of on your attackers." The speaker goes on to reflect on the logic of such an illness residing in the body of "A halfbreed woman" who, for historical reasons, "can hardly do anything else / but attack herself." Being Indian and white, the speaker says, "cancel each other out. / Leaving no one in the place," which would be fine except that, being a woman, she must perform caring duties regardless of her circumstance. The speaker describes her mother’s physical pain, her ". . . eyes burn, / they tear themselves apart . . . / her joints swell to the point / of explosion, eruption," concluding with the observation that "when volatile substances are intertwined, / when irreconcilable opposites meet, / the crucible and its contents vaporize."

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Californians Sara and Richard Everton move to Ibarra, a village in central Mexico, where Richard plans to reopen the copper mine his grandfather had worked before the Revolution of 1910. Six months after arriving, Richard learns he has leukemia. Their Ibarra neighbors offer home remedies, for they have a "companionship with death": "daily and without surprise," the people of Ibarra meet "their individual dooms . . . [and accept] as inevitable the hail on the ripe corn, the vultures at the heart of the starved cow, the stillborn child." Creating stories about the villagers, Sara gives them happy endings, the kind she wants for Richard's story. After his death, in a California hospital, Sara returns to Ibarra, and the villagers bring stones to mark their remembrance of Richard.

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Jeff Taylor, a young surgeon whose career was cut short by a hand accident, decides, after finishing a residency in anesthesia, to enter the newest residency program offered by Northwest Regional Hospital: a program in euthanasia. The novel features three residents and their superior; a reporter for a tabloid who tapes hospital conversations; Pennington, a wealthy conservative who wants to increase pressure on those performing abortions; and Micah Chaine, an ex-priest hired by Pennington to work behind the scenes setting up demonstrations and setting off bombs.

Chaine, feeding on his own religious beliefs, decides those involved in the euthanasia program must die. When Pennington wants out of their deal, Chaine kidnaps Pennington's wife and one of the euthanasia residents and sets bombs for the others.

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Streetwise, smart, and tough Winter Santiaga is the "phat" and "fly" daughter of a Brooklyn drug kingpin, and is also the main character in this novel. She and her sisters, Lexus, Mercedes, and Porsche have grown up used to a life of luxury afforded by her father's protective but lavish attentions on them.

They are contemptuous of all but the best labels for clothes, perfumes, and shoes. Her mother dresses like a queen and, with her family, enjoys life in a beautiful house that Winter's father buys them in the suburbs. The life all comes crashing down around them when her father is arrested and locked up, and the government takes all the family's money and possessions.

Winter's younger sisters are farmed out to foster families and her mother descends into crack cocaine addiction. Sister Souljah, who in a move many critics call a serious misstep, casts herself in the novel as the moral compass, opens her home to Winter, who lives there for a while, listening to Souljah's messages of self-love and community building. Never buying the rap, Winter drifts from man to man, finally herself is arrested for drug related charges and winds up serving a 15-year sentence for having (as she says) "a bad attitude."

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Miracles describes the speaker's Catholic school training and how he moved from an unquestioning faith in the possibility of miracles to disbelief, and the mixed feelings of relief, guilt, and a sense of exile that accompanied this shift.

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Dr. Sunit "Sonny" Seth is a gifted but troubled (emotionally and spiritually) third year resident who works at a New York hospital that treats and employs many immigrants from India. The sleep-walking Sonny is assigned to care for a prominent Indian politician known as the Transplanted Man, a patient who has already received seven organ transplants and is currently in renal failure.

Sonny mysteriously rescues the Transplanted Man from the brink of death following a kidney transplant but later learns his patient died from a cardiac arrest. Although Sonny is no stranger to personal loss and longing, the death of this special patient serves as a catalyst. He breaks up with his girlfriend, quits his residency, and dreams of relocating to Trinidad. Meanwhile, nearly everyone else Sonny knows seems to be struggling with their role and place in the world as well.

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Two voices are heard in this short poem: an English-speaking interviewer and a Spanish-speaking respondent. The interviewer’s lines consist of a battery of single-word questions corresponding to common categories on an intake form ("address/occupation/age/marital status . . . "). The respondent attempts to humanize the interchange by providing significant personal and cultural information. He interjects politely, "perdone . . . ," introducing first himself, "yo me llamo pedro," and then naming his father, "el senor ortega / (a veces don jose)." The interviewer is never swayed from the bureaucratic list of one-word questions.

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance tells the story of Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin), a young Korean man who cannot hear or speak, whose sister Han Bo-bae is dangerously ill with kidney disease. Because Ryu and Bo-bae are poor and there is no social system of health coverage in Korea, Bo-bae is not able to receive the transplant she needs to survive. Ryu wants to give his sister one of his own kidneys but he has the wrong blood type. When Ryu is laid off and given a lump sum in severance pay, he seeks out black-market organ transplant. He agrees to give one of his kidneys and ten million won (roughly US $10,000) in exchange for a kidney for his sister. Ryu awakens from anesthesia to find that his kidney has been removed and his money stolen by the black marketeers.

When a kidney becomes available through the hospital, Ryu and his friend Cha-youngmi (Du-na Bae) kidnap the daughter of a wealthy factory owner (Kang-ho Song) in order to raise the money to pay for it. The child dies in an accident and two vengeance plots unfold, that of Ryu punishing the black marketeers and the vengeance that the factory owner wreaks on Ryu and Youngmi for the death of his daughter.

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