Summary:

It is a sad world when Pelayo discovers an old man with large, weathered wings stuck in the mud. It has been raining for three days. The beach is a mixture of rotting crabs and sludge. Stench is everywhere. Worst of all, Pelayo's baby is ill with a fever.

Because the strange visitor possesses wings and speaks an unknown dialect, no one knows for certain who or what he is. He seems awfully decrepit to be a supernatural being. A neighbor thinks he's an angel who has come for the baby. Pelayo and his wife, Elisenda, suspect he is a sailor or castaway. The parish priest, Father Gonzaga, believes the old man is not an angel but rather an imposter.

After examining the man with wings, the doctor decides it is impossible such a creature is even alive. The old man is locked in a chicken coop and treated like a freak. People pay five cents to view him, and before long, Pelayo and Elisenda make enough money to build a mansion. Their newborn child regains his health.

When the boy is older, both he and the old man with wings contract chicken pox. The old man is mistreated and burned with a branding iron. All he eats is eggplant mush. The town is visited by many carnival attractions including a woman transformed into a spider because she defied her parents. People eventually lose interest in the old man. One winter he has a fever and is delirious. He not only survives but grows new wings. His clumsy attempts at flight eventually improve and one day he disappears into the horizon.

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This is a poem about medical success. The cardiologist speaker addresses a patient in absentia, thinking about the progress of the man's case on the occasion of making a house call. The doctor recalls the valve-replacement operation he performed in his early years of practice and is pleased that, clumsy as the replacement may be next to a good natural valve, it has kept the patient alive for seven years. The speaker sums up his view (in lines often quoted): "Health is whatever works / and for as long."

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Set in 1894 and based on a history of the logging projects among the California sequoias, this is a story of Francie, whose sister died in an accident six years earlier. She chafes under her parents' excessive protectiveness since Carrie's death. She loves the woods, and longs to do something to keep the loggers from cutting down the ancient sequoias, especially the oldest and largest, a tree over 2500 years old. Through a little sleuthing based on her sister's diary, she finds out that the property on which the ancient tree sits actually belongs to an old hermit, not to the logging company.

In an effort to get the company to stop before cutting the oldest tree, she rides the dangerous log flume into town to alert the one journalist she knows will support her cause. They arrive in time to save that tree and some of the others, and, perhaps as importantly to Francie, her mother and father begin to see her not only in terms of their loss of Carrie, but as a young woman independently interesting, daring, and very much alive.

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In the fall of 1983, Treya Killam was about to be married to Ken Wilber, a prominent theorist in the field of transpersonal psychology, when she was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of breast cancer. This is Ken Wilber's story, with much of it told through his wife Treya's journals and letters, of their five-year battle against her cancer, a long roller-coaster ride that ended in her death by euthanasia in 1988. The narrative includes details of several conventional and unconventional cancer therapies.

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Morgan Spurlock decides to test the effects of fast food by eating nothing but food from McDonald's, three meals a day, for thirty days. Three physicians and a dietician are involved from the outset and track his rapidly increasing weight and declining health. Along the way he visits McDonald's outlets around the US, interviewing workers and fast food enthusiasts, and considers the implications of a recent lawsuit brought against McDonald's by customers who blame the company for their obesity.

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It is 1905, and a young doctor just out of internship in Chicago has decided to head for the southwest to seek his fortune. He finds himself on a slow train in southern New Mexico, sitting across from a Sister of Mercy "in her black robes, skirts and sleeves, and heavy starch." When the train stops, the doctor inquires about a group of men huddled on the platform. They surround a severely ill Mexican worker, who turns out to have appendicitis. The doctor insists that only an immediate operation will save his life, but the Mexicans are violently opposed to surgery. Eventually, the doctor enlists the nun’s help to persuade them.

In the blistering heat, they carry the man to a shed where the doctor performs an appendectomy with instruments in his black bag, including morphine and chloroform. For the next 24 hours, he and the nun watch over the man, and then carry him to the nearest town on the next train. He survives, which is good because otherwise the Mexicans have threatened to kill the doctor. The nun, who throughout has been cool toward the doctor because of his use of "rough" language, proceeds on her way to Texas.

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Dr. Audlin is a highly successful psychoanalyst. His patient, Lord Mountdrago, is a leading member of the House of Lords and Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the British government. Mountdrago consults Audlin because of nightly vivid and threatening dreams, all of which concern Owen Griffiths, a member of the opposition in the House of Commons. Griffiths is a small, unimpressive commoner from a constituency in Wales. As Griffiths becomes progressively more the focus of his dreams, Mountdrago cannot imagine why, since to him the man is insignificant vermin.

Audlin presses his patient if there is any reason why Griffiths might actually be hostile toward the Lord, or that he (Mountdrago) might feel guilt regarding Griffiths. Eventually Mountdrago is forced to admit that on one occasion when Griffiths made a speech proposing a change in foreign policy, Mountdrago crushed him. Using his very considerable oratorical skill, Mountdrago tore Griffiths apart and held him up to ridicule. This, in turn, ruined Griffiths' career. Mountdrago hadn't initially thought of the affair since Griffiths was beneath contempt and deserved to be crushed; as such, he had no reason to hold a grudge against Mountdrago.

The psychoanalyst suggests that the only way Mountdrago can free himself from the dreams is to apologize to Griffiths. Mountdrago angrily rejects this, but then goes out and commits suicide. In the end we learn that Owen Griffiths dies the same night, presumably by suicide.

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Miracle McCloy received her name because, as she's been told many times, she was pulled from the body of her mother shortly after her mother was run over and killed by a bus. Raised largely by her grandmother with her depressed and dysfunctional father nearby, she has learned a great deal about séances, contacting the dead, reading auras, and paying attention to energy fields. But she doesn't know much about how to locate her own confused feelings about her parents, her identity, and her relationships with "normal" kids at school who see her has some kind of freak.

She perpetuates this image by casting "spells" to help fellow students connect with boyfriends. But after her father disappears, and her grandfather's house is destroyed in a tornado, she lapses into mental illness and burns herself badly trying to "melt" as she believes her father did by dancing among flaming candles. She is taken to an institution where an astute therapist and an aunt who realizes how much Miracle needed her combine their efforts to help her recover a sense of who she is--a dancer, a strongly intuitive, intelligent girl with an interesting history and a promising life to live, liberated from the obsessions of a superstitious grandmother and mentally ill father.

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This is a collection of humane and humorous stories by psychiatrist Ronald Pies. Many of them portray snippets of Jewish-American family life; others feature Pies's alter egos, young psychiatrists named Applebaum; or Ackerman, or Alterman; still others introduce a number of wonderful geriatric characters the reader is unlikely to forget.

In the title story, an elderly man lies in the hospital and remembers how he inserted snippets of pornography into his business partner's tefillin nearly 40 years earlier, just to spite his holier-than-thou partner, who had evicted his Playboy magazines from the premises. "Mandelbaum's Passion" is the story of an elderly professor whose daughter wants to put him into a nursing home. He, on the other hand, focuses his energy on anticipating the twice-weekly visits of Luz, his 26-year-old Hispanic visiting nurse.

Dr. Otto Hertzmann in "Show Us Where God Is" is a retired analytic psychiatrist who lives with his sister. When a young admirer comes to visit, the sister introduces him to Davie, Hertzmann's severely retarded son who, when asked to "show us where God is," grins widely and points to the ceiling. Max Dershman, found dead in his room "stinking of cheap cigars and surrounded by Playboy centerfolds," is another such character. He falls head over heels in love with Riva Greenberg, the nursing home social worker, and leaves her a love letter when he dies ("A Medical Diptych"). In "Sophie Fein Goldberg Stein" the title character insists on always being addressed by her full name--at least, that is, until the nursing home psychiatrist is willing to sit down and listen to the full story of her life.

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This selection of Miroslav Holub's poems is organized around five major topics--genealogy, anthropology, semiology, pathology, and tautology--rather than chronologically. The poems, some of which date back to his first collection in 1958, were translated into English by a number of different persons, but mostly by David Young, who has had a long-term collaboration with Holub.

Holub states his major preoccupation in "Bones," the very first poem in this collection: "We seek / a backbone / that will stay / straight." (p. 13) The search reaches its fullest expression in "Interferon," a long poem about messages, messengers, and interference: "Cells infected by a virus / send signals out . . .

And when a poet dies, deep in the night / a long black bird wakes up in the thicket / and sings for all it's worth." (p.159) The first step in the search is to learn to interpret the signals, and to understand the black bird's song. To do that, one has to ask questions. Yet, in the face of enormous "Suffering," we are drawn to passivity: "But I ask no questions, / no one asks any questions, / because it's all quite useless." (p. 147) How to overcome the inertia and proceed, even in the face of likely failure?

Holub reminds us that even "In the Microscope" we find "cells, fighters / who lay down their lives / for a song." (p. 149) In fact, there may be something worth fighting for, although perhaps we can only see it under extreme circumstances, as in "Crush Syndrome," where a concrete mixer snaps up the hand of a man cleaning it: "The finger bones / said a few things you don't hear very often...In that moment / I realized I had a soul." (p. 174). But perhaps what we call the soul is really just our deep yearning to survive, as in "Heart Transplant": "It's like a model of a battlefield / where Life and Spirit / have been fighting / and both have won." (p. 179)

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