Kirjahaku

A man wakes up . . . with no other identity than his affinity for the English language. He is given a name-"Akimo"-by his non-English-speaking Asian attendant, and gradually, Akimo comes to realize he is being confined-held against his will-by persons who claim that he has been in an induced coma for several years-placed in that state for his own good. Despite his conclusion that he is an American, "Chancery," the institution where he is being held, appears to be a cancer-treatment facility that has taken over the grounds and buildings of a Great House-quite possibly a French chateau, although most of the "guests" are British or American, while most of the staff seem Asian or continental European. Just as curious, when he is permitted to join other guests in a small chemotherapy group, he discovers that although all of them are being treated for cancer, many are also suffering from severe head trauma. Like him, none of them remembers his or her name, or what they were doing before they returned to consciousness in Chancery's domain. Several of them suspect that they are just prisoners being subjected to medical experimentation. All of them want to escape. Soon, two questions come to dominate Akimo's thinking: First, with all this treatment going on all around him, why is no one recovering, and why does no one ever leave? The only place his departing colleagues seem to go is to more desperate circumstances-down in "the Hole," for CBX treatment. As his washed-out female colleague Kimo-Kell explains: "CBX is CBT-Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy; with the 'X', it means 'as applied to cancer treatment'." She brightened and put on a radio-announcer's voice. "Have a fear of heights? -A fear of nights, or a fear of bright lights? -How about a fear of frights? -CBX will put it all to rights." Second, since no one ever leaves, when internally publicized visitors days come, why does no one ever visit? It isn't long before Akimo's observations lead him to become an accessory in a desperate "prison break." His tendency to keep bad company gains him an unpleasant private audience with Chancery's chief administrator, the Keeper of the Rolls, and when his work assignment as a member of the grounds crew finds him picking up trash on an obscure path in a dark wood near the institution's high-walled perimeter, he runs head on into the double-barreled shotgun and twin black mastiffs of Chancery's head of security, Warden Bardell. Akimo's discovery of Chancery's nefarious purpose and diabolical operations leads him to discover his own previous identity and purpose in life, and just when he seems to have escaped, one more twist returns him to the site of his former ordeal-just in time for a final revelation.

With the return of Chaucer Jeffries and his fellow students from their Egyptian captivity in "Chaucer on the Nile," the University of Bologna of Ohio-'Baloney U' to alumni and all who love her-moves to the foreground in this second volume of the UBO trilogy.In "Gloriana at Baloney U," Bonnie Boatwright, the university's successful president is planning to retire soon and schemes to have her former colleague and best friend Mimi Patterson return to UBO as chief academic officer, thereby gaining the inside track to the presidency that will soon be vacant.After sacking her current chief academic officer and stacking the search committee that will pick his replacement, Bonnie is well into her game of gulling faculty fools and wielding administrative knaves when she discovers that Sam Foy, the chairman of the university's board of trustees, is plotting with a major donor to replace her with his own presidential candidate, Crystal Mcleod-an attractive and personable blind poet who has her own agenda for UBO. Despite failing health, Bonnie struggles to preserve her 'dream succession', along with her own version of institutional integrity, culminating in a power struggle with Sam, and an attempted coup that roils the last board meeting of the school year and renders the spring graduation ceremony tragic-or hilarious-for most of its participants.

On the eve of the destruction of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Chaucer Jeffries, a budding writer who wants to be "the kind of person on whom nothing is lost," trains his finely honed instrument on the tourist scene in Cairo and along the Nile-before blundering into a terrorist conference on the Red Sea where fireworks are the literal result. A double major in literature and international business at the University of Bologna of Ohio ("Baloney U") who is taking classes on a study-abroad trip, Chaucer gets detoured and distracted when one of his college friends goes missing near the pyramids of Giza and a flash drive containing terrorist recruitment materials turns up in his backpack. Overnight, Chaucer finds himself a 'person of interest' at the center of a web of international intrigue being spun by forces he cannot easily identify. Ultimately, these forces draw Chaucer's crew into a conflict between the leaders of two terrorist factions and the thuggish Amn al-Dawla-the government's internal security service-a conflict whose resolution hinges on one disaffected software programmer choosing whether and how to do the right thing with what he knows. In the process of extricating himself and his friends from danger, Chaucer not only gains some practical knowledge of international business and international terrorism, but learns a bit about negotiating borders in love and friendship as well.Chaucer on the Nile is a funny story, full of interesting characters, in the tradition of The Canterbury Tales, and a moral tale in the tradition of The Divine Comedy and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, a work of immediate political and social relevance to our efforts to manage the inevitable tension between international competition and international community.

"Struldbruggs: The Life Everlasting" is the third and final volume of the Baloney U trilogy that began on a school trip with "Chaucer on the Nile," continued on campus in "Gloriana at Baloney U," and here concludes-shuffling on the edge of the abyss.In Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," struldbruggs were humanlike creatures who live forever, but grow ever more vicious and grasping with each passing year. Recently retired emeritus professor George Badget, a widower, shares Swift's vision, seeing those around him living longer, but living increasingly dissolute, desperate lives-intent on staying young and looking up from the trough only occasionally to consider whether life has any larger meaning. As he moves into retirement without the stability of marriage, and the familiarity of his teaching and research routine, he becomes positively infatuated with a younger woman, Adelaide Myers, and, apparently, she with him. -Problem is, he's approaching seventy and she's barely eighteen. In the sight of God (and the neighbors), is there any way to make this thing work?Badget's attachment to Adelaide becomes the occasion for a personal search for insight: Although he becomes increasingly convinced that "everything" is not permitted, he struggles to reach an understanding of what is permitted: What is a morally good life in the present age? How should we live?For Adelaide, a good-looking and smart girl who comes from an environment where the lust for constant distraction and entertainment rules human behavior, the prospect of climbing out of the bathos, to live in a place bursting with brilliant stuff worth knowing, becomes an obsession: There must, she figures, be more to life than hustling, Hulu, and hook-ups.Badget and Adelaide's relationship is complicated by the attentions of a local police detective who is investigating a sexual-harassment complaint filed against Adelaide by the high-school principal, while concurrently probing things that don't add up in the death of Badget's wife, a school psychologist who died in a traffic accident on the way home from chaperoning the senior prom, more than a year earlier. Was she murdered, and if so, by whom?

When Detective Hinky Doanes parachutes in to become chief of the tired old Oakwood Mills police force, people expect heads will roll-but not down the streets of the town's tony residential neighborhood of mostly ethnic-Asian businessmen, professors, and researchers.Soon, the grisly decapitation has attracted investigators from the state police, and when the separated heads and bodies of Chinese-American businessmen and scientists continue to show up in nearby states, the FBI becomes involved.Despite having no claim to jurisdiction, Hinky and his friend Charlie Lee, an ethnic-Chinese officer of the nearby state university's police services, pursue their own unofficial investigation, which leads them back in time and halfway around the world to Tiananmen Square in June 1989, where they discover the true identity of the popular folk-hero "Tank Man" and his Chinese radical friends, and learn the intimate connection between old political and personal animosities and present-day international business imperatives that seem to include serial murders.The meddling of Hinky and his friend not only brings down the wrath of the FBI but draws critical attention from the town council, the university's police services administration, and national intelligence officials in Washington and Beijing-threatening Hinky's and Charlie's lives and livelihoods. Persevering seems foolhardy, but if they can solve the murders and apprehend the murderers, the bloodshed will stop, their reputations will be assured, and public order will be restored.

If you were a savvy entrepreneur with an idea for a business that trained working-class young women to be "kept" by carefully selected, highly successful businessmen who would underwrite your costs and pay you a finder's fee, what would you need to guarantee financial success? For starters, you would need to make your girls marketable by correcting their talk, taste, and teeth; then you would want to provide each girl with an appropriate place to entertain her rich boyfriend-ideally, a spacious and attractive living unit in one of your company's dedicated gated communities-within a reasonable drive of the boyfriend's major metro. You also would need to provide a way for your young women to rationalize their behavior to themselves: a way to find virtue and dignity in their daily lives. Probably, you would need to come up with a philosophical or religious overlay that would reassure each kept woman that she was not a kept woman at all, but a "life-partner"-a loving helpmate who provides a relaxing and supportive environment where she can devote her life to the comfort and pleasure of her male partner-all with the blessing of someone with unquestioned moral stature-some larger-than-life model of all that is loving and good. Someone like Jesus. You would need to include an uncomplicated religious pathway for your resident young ladies to find their way to your company's brand of Jesus. They would be highly motivated to do this because it would be in their personal self-interest: Without you and Jesus, there would be no prospect of a happy-ever-after: no lovely home with designer furniture and all mod cons, no expensive clothing and lingerie, no gourmet meals, no wine cellars, no guiltfree, glamorous lifestyles with expansive recreational facilities for things like spinning classes, yoga, and barre exercises; none of this would be possible unless a girl embraced the social and religious teachings of your company-The Blessed Company of Jesus.Finally, you would need to recognize that, even tricked out in all its luxurious sophistication, your sex-trafficking business is totally dependent on a perishable product: good figures and good looks-and the amorous desires of men attracted to them-won't last forever, even when wrapped in the most seductive packaging. So, when aging product has lost it appeal and reached its expiration date, The Blessed Company would need to remove it from the shelves-as cleanly, quietly, and economically as possible.