The stories, tales, and memories of Life-Arc Teaching Tales deal with the instructiveness of teaching, as well as the hammered, ironic learning of getting through any lifetime. ""First come the inverted parables: a live deer is embalmed in white paint by kids who can't believe he's real; a surfer becomes a ghost rider in the curl of a wave; a widow's son is underwhelmed by success when he wears the vest she gave him inside out. The darkly comical stories that follow culminate in Zeugner's account of his own memory-riddled heart attack. The collection is a virtuoso performance to be savored...

Description:
Rectors assistant Owen Mathias, a young and average sensualist, gradually stumbles on the considerable connections his church in Kobe, Japan, has to atrocities committed by Unit 731, Japans biological warfare research center in Harbin, Manchuria, during World War II. Mathiass discoveries toss him into theodicys deepest pit, savaging his faith and pinballing him among the vapid convictions of his rector, the pieties of ex-pat parishioners, the bitter doubts of an American missionary couple, the placid sexuality of his Japanese girlfriend, and the fey manipulations of Japanese...

Description:
These novellas track three meaning-making, moral skirmishes: a thickening tennis pro on the Florida-New York teaching circuit grapples with weakening personal commitments and a fading serve; a dispirited short-term Coast Guard reservist struggles with the ambiguity of an accidental murder on an icebreaker heading to the arctic; and an American vacuum sewers entrepreneur and a local archeologist explore the exploitation of women, art, and sexual comedy in Venice, Italy.

An off-hand speculation by ex-pat and professor, David Moran, sends his celebrated historian colleague, Graham Guade, on an investigation that peels back American use of, and protection for, Japanese doctors who committed unspeakable medical experiments in WWII. The inquiry into the legacy of those atrocities churns up murder and madness in both countries, and toys with the interplay of intimacy and career success, as well as accident and causality in history. Get ready for a thrilling, fun, and thoughtful read. Japan in the postwar period; conspiracy; Japanese and Americans fooling each...