Perhaps no medical breakthrough in the twentieth century is more spectacular, more hope-giving, or more fraught with ethical questions than organ transplantation. Each year some 25,000 Americans are pulled back from the brink of death by receiving vital new organs. Another 5,000 die while waiting for them. And what distinguishes these two groups has become the source of one of our thorniest ethical questions.
In Raising the Dead, Ronald Munson offers a vivid, often wrenchingly dramatic account of how transplants are performed, how we decide who receives them, and how we engage...

Advances in medical technology force us to struggle with new and often gut-wrenching decisions. How do we know when someone is dead and not just in a coma? Should a convicted felon qualify for a new heart? In The Woman Who Decided to Die, novelist and medical ethicist Ronald Munson takes readers to the very edges of medicine, where treatments fail and where people must cope with helplessness, mortality, and doubt. Using personal narratives that place us right next to doctors, patients, and care givers as they make decisions, Munson explores ten riveting case-based stories, told with...

Perhaps no medical breakthrough in the twentieth century is more spectacular, more hope-giving, or more fraught with ethical questions than organ transplantation. Each year some 25,000 Americans are pulled back from the brink of death by receiving vital new organs. Another 5,000 die while waiting for them. And what distinguishes these two groups has become the source of one of our thorniest ethical questions.
In Raising the Dead, Ronald Munson offers a vivid, often wrenchingly dramatic account of how transplants are performed, how we decide who receives them, and how we engage...

Inspired by Raymond Chandler's telling phrase, Ronald Munson has depicted a criminal as shocking as "a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake." Drawing form actual profiles of serial killers, he has created a bone-chillingly accurate portrait of a psychopath's mind and methods. In the conviction that nothing human is truly alien to another human being, he offers a novel of three lives inextricably joined - cop, killer and potential victim - each dramatically different, yet linked by similarities they can't escape. A powerful story that introduces a refreshing maverick to the gallery of...

He calls himself Cyberwolf. A legend among hackers, he prowls cyberspace, lurking in electronic shadows. Yet beneath his smooth, polite surface, his eerily evolved superintellect pulsates with a twisted, primitive lust to violate the ultimate taboo with the unlimited power of the computer networks. His object of desire is Susan Bradstreet, one of Hollywood's reigning stars. He knows everything about her-her heartaches, her bank balances, her unlisted phone number. As for Susan, Cyberwolf will give her the terror of her life and the role of her career: She will be his kidnap victim. And as he...