Paul Frederick Kluge

A brilliant young transplant surgeon brings moral intensity and narrative drama to the most powerful and vexing questions of medicine and the human condition. When Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives--what she did not count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Almost immediately, Chen found herself wrestling with medicine's most profound paradox, that a profession premised on caring for the ill also systematically depersonalizes dying. Over the course of her education, training, and practice, she grappled at strikingly close range with the problem of mortality, struggling to reconcile the lessons of her training with her innate knowledge of shared humanity, and to separate her ideas about healing from her fierce desire to cure. Her rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a provocative questioning of how we should live.--From publisher description.

Another King, another Graceland, another chance... A dozen years after Elvis Presley's death in Memphis, a man called Biggest Elvis - the oldest and fattest of a trio of Presley impersonators - galvanizes the sailors and bar girls around the huge U.S. naval base in Olongapo, Philippines. In their act, Baby Elvis (who portrays the youthful Presley), Dude Elvis (who does the movie years), and Biggest Elvis incarnate the King's evolving life. Their popularity grows; in a tawdry, anything-goes town, a successful act becomes more than that, almost an obsession. But there are those who think that Biggest Elvis has to go, and Biggest Elvis himself senses that something is coming, something ominous. As the trio of counterfeits starts playing for real stakes, the bar girls - Whitney, Elvira, Dolly, Lucy Number Three, and Malou - take center stage themselves, before Biggest Elvis's last and greatest show.

"A tropical island far from the complications of home draws four lost souls to make a new life. How can the past catch up to them over the wide expanse of the South Pacific--and how can hope not thrive, in this sunny, idyllic place with little history of its own?"--Jacket.

Follows the life of Hans Greifinger, a German American who immigrated to the United States in 1928 and built a life for himself in New Jersey, and his son, George, who has adopted the surname Griffin for his lackluster, nationally syndicated travel column.