At once a chess master, a linguist, an athlete and an innocent in love, Arnold passes through the racial tensions of Mansfield, Texas (home of the author of Black Like Me) in the 1950s, the anti-war movement at Harvard, and both the Upper East Side and the Bowery, meeting Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, and Leonard Bernstein in the process, and finally learning the meaning of meaning.
By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers.A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking and who believes the world to be completely irrational, should not take one companion for granted, much less two. Women who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions, and his antic clowning all at the same time are not easy to come by.But when the thought arises in Alan that he’s been “chosen” to deliver Jewish America from the...
The Good Doctor Guillotin follows five characters to a common destination—the scaffold at the first guillotining of the French Revolution:Dr. Guillotin, of course, a physician and member of the National Assembly, involved in many important events, including the Tennis Court Oath. Nicolas Pelletier, the first victim—or “patient,” as they were sometimes called, since the new beheading machine was seen as a humanitarian medical intervention in the...
Who would benefit if they really did bring The Rapture on?Marc Estrin follows another of his strange protagonists through a world troubled by what it knows and by how it applies that knowledge.From the first page, we are plunged into a global riot of paranoia, joy, and fear. But something is sadly familiar here, perhaps because we have been taught to anticipate a world in which people suddenly fly off the planet. It might be The Rapture. Or it might be some violation of the force of gravity....
