Frontiers of legal theory

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Sara Gruen

After embarrassing themselves at the social event of the year in high society Philadelphia on New Year's Eve of 1942, Maddie and Ellis Hyde are cut off financially by Ellis's father, a former army Colonel who is already embarrassed by his son's inability to serve in WWII due to his being colorblind. To Maddie's horror, Ellis decides that the only way to regain his father's favor is to succeed in a venture his father attempted and very publicly failed at: he will hunt the famous Loch Ness monster. When he finds it, he will restore his father's name and return to his father's good graces (and pocketbook). Joined by their friend Hank, a wealthy socialite, the three make their way to Scotland in the midst of war. Each day the two men go off to hunt the monster, while another monster, Hitler, is devastating Europe. And Maddie, now alone in a foreign country, must begin to figure out who she is and what she wants. The novel tells of Maddie's social awakening: to the harsh realities of life, to the beauties of nature, to a connection with forces larger than herself, to female friendship, and finally, to love.

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David B. Morris

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of by them. Illness has changed in the postmodern era--roughly the period since World War II--as dramatically as technology, transportation, and the texture of everyday life. Exploring these changes, David B. Morris tells the fascinating story, or stories, of what goes into making the postmodern experience of illness different, perhaps unique. Even as he decries the overuse and misuse of the term "postmodern," Morris shows how brightly ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism illuminate one another in late-twentieth-century culture. Modern medicine traditionally separates disease--an objectively verified disorder--from illness--a patient's subjective experience. Postmodern medicine, Morris says, can make no such clean distinction instead, it demands a biocultural model, situating illness at the crossroads of biology and culture. Maladies such as chronic fatigue syndrome and post-traumatic stress disorder signal our awareness that there are biocultural ways of being sick. The biocultural vision of illness not only blurs old boundaries but also offers a new and infinitely promising arena for investigating both biology and culture. In many ways Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age leads us to understand our experience of the world differently.

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Howard Waskow & Arthur Waskow

This is a book for brothers - and for sisters, too; for the feelings to which these brothers testify - fear, envy, anger - are familiar to almost everyone who has a sibling. They are heightened and dramatized in the tale of Cain and Abel, which like other stories in the Bible speaks to us of universal themes in human life. Howard and Arthur Waskow grew up as brothers in a quiet Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore during the 1940s. In this unusually honest book they demonstrate that powerful emotions such as these do lie beneath the surface of everyday family life. As with many siblings, behind a superficial layer of civility their relationship was distant, competitive, antagonistic; their conflict extended well into their adult years. Eventually their divorces, their mother's final illness, and their own desire to change brought them toward one another.^ Wary at first, they set out on a journey of discovery and recovery that was helped to completion by the need to care for their aging father, and by the collaborative writing of this book. Becoming Brothers is uniquely both a record and an instrument of this deliberate and painful reconciliation. In alternating chapters, these brothers reconstruct their struggle piece by piece, crossing back through years of conflict to the roots of their estrangement - often wrestling with contested bits of memory, enlightening and enlivening each other, doing the hard but necessary work of intimate relationship. Theirs is a universal story about the way in which people grow apart and how they can discover one another, and themselves, by acknowledging their similarities and accepting their differences. In the end, the brothers find that only through understanding who they were as sons and brothers can they fulfill their mature roles as husbands and fathers.^ Their search for wholeness requires them to cooperate and finally to forgive. This beautifully written, humane, and intelligent book reminds its readers not only that everyday life can be deeply significant, but that fundamental change is always possible.

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Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie

In this interdisciplinary investigation of empathy leading researchers from philosophy and psychology explore the its role in our capacity to understand other people and predict what they think, feel, and do; the part it plays in our ethical responses to others; and its importance to our appreciation of art and fiction.