With Charactered Pieces, Caleb J. Ross presents a varied world of familial discord, one where a dead fetus evokes more compassion than its mother (“Charactered Pieces”); where two brothers offer the destruction of a family legacy as a birthday gift for their aging father (“My Family’s Rule”); where one brother’s love of Holocaust documentaries pushes his family through the aftermath of his assumed suicide (“The Camp”). Charactered Pieces peels away the superficial armor of public life to reveal the flaws beneath and treats those perceived weaknesses not as hidden sources of pain but as reasons to celebrate life.
The child he loves. The idea of a child, he's beginning to understand, is where everything will go wrong. William works as a human remains removal specialist, removing stains left by the dead. Whether by a bloody crime scene or a quiet domestic death, William is reminded each day of the frailty of human life. As his fiancée, Julie, nears term with their first child William becomes increasingly desperate for a way to overcome his belief that to birth is to kill. But Mrs. Rose, an elementary school principal and messenger pigeon hobbyist, nurtures William’s depressive outlook and claims to have a way to prove that William’s hesitancy to accept fatherhood is not only natural but necessary. In this novel of impending parenthood, an idealistic teacher recruits a pliant protégé to join her group of Strangers – a devout collection of kindred minds who have dedicated their lives to cultivating a unique idea of perfection. But joining is easier than leaving. ,
Jackson Jacoby is a motherless twenty-two year old boy with only the support of his crazy ex-military Uncle Marve and a kindred motherless peer named Creg. Creg holds fast to the hope of one day reuniting with his mother while Jackson maintains that his own life is so much better off without all the baggage that comes along with being somebody's son. After finding a plea in a newspaper from a woman begging her runaway son, Kevin Masons, to return home, Jackson takes the opportunity to prove to Creg that a mother is not necessary to be happy. What begins as a drunken call to the mysterious mother leads to a cross-country pilgrimage to attend the will reading of Kevin's recently deceased grandfather. Along the way, Jackson spreads tales of his participation in the human appendage trade, the history of his missing ear, and anything else that might validate his life the way he insists that a mother never could.From I Didn't Mean to be Kevin:"My mother kicked me out when I was ten. I slept on couches, benches, in ditches and did everything short of kill house pets in order to eat. My uncle took me in during the worst of it, but because I was alone for most of my life I never had the opportunity to know if what I was doing truly mattered. Validation is a basic need in all of us. If you don't get it as a kid, you try getting it as a teenager. If you don't get it as a teenager, you try getting it as a twenty-two year old deformed, vagabond. My uncle says I have 'nomadic roots' but that implies roots of some kind. I've never had roots. I've never had a home life to point me where I needed to go. I've never had a destination, until recently.”
With Charactered Pieces, Caleb J. Ross presents a varied world of familial discord, one where a dead fetus evokes more compassion than its mother (“Charactered Pieces”); where two brothers offer the destruction of a family legacy as a birthday gift for their aging father (“My Family’s Rule”); where one brother’s love of Holocaust documentaries pushes his family through the aftermath of his assumed suicide (“The Camp”). Charactered Pieces peels away the superficial armor of public life to reveal the flaws beneath and treats those perceived weaknesses not as hidden sources of pain but as reasons to celebrate life.
The child he loves. The idea of a child, he's beginning to understand, is where everything will go wrong. William works as a human remains removal specialist, removing stains left by the dead. Whether by a bloody crime scene or a quiet domestic death, William is reminded each day of the frailty of human life. As his fiancée, Julie, nears term with their first child William becomes increasingly desperate for a way to overcome his belief that to birth is to kill. But Mrs. Rose, an elementary school principal and messenger pigeon hobbyist, nurtures William’s depressive outlook and claims to have a way to prove that William’s hesitancy to accept fatherhood is not only natural but necessary. In this novel of impending parenthood, an idealistic teacher recruits a pliant protégé to join her group of Strangers – a devout collection of kindred minds who have dedicated their lives to cultivating a unique idea of perfection. But joining is easier than leaving. ,
Featuring extensive references, updated for this paperback edition, Longevity, Senescence, and the Genome constitutes a landmark contribution to biomedicine and the evolutionary biology of aging. To enhance gerontology's focus on human age-related dysfunctions, Caleb E. Finch provides a comparative review of all the phyla of organisms, broadening gerontology to intersect with behavioral, developmental, evolutionary, and molecular biology. By comparing species that have different developmental and life spans, Finch proposes an original typology of senescence from rapid to gradual to negligible, and he provides the first multiphyletic calculations of mortality rate constants.
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