"Long ago his mother had routinely cleaned the windows of the family home to invisibility. But the glass had shut him away nevertheless, a fading print of a boy, a creature as flat and boneless as the paper animals taped on the plaster. The symptoms of chronic disease had excluded him from the world outside-and the world inside, created from books piled high in the sickroom provided small compensation for his expected death. Only the vast histories of human conflict were a consolation. His reading and rereading of them intensified the enmity that nourished his remaining strength. Or that's...