From the preface:
This book is a slightly revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation which was submitted on 10 December 1993 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The committee members were Jim McCloskey (chair), Sandra Chung, Donka Farkas and Bill Ladusaw. In preparing this version for publication, I have left the text of the original more or less untouched, apart from the addition of this preface, an index and some occasional footnotes discussing more recent literature.

Your body is a fortress under constant assault. Infectious diseases, parasites, environmental toxins, physical trauma, allergens, and natural disasters are some external enemies it faces. From the inside, it is threatened by occasional overzealous allergic, immune, and inflammatory responses, as well as by the cellular mutations that produce cancer.

The Fire Kimono

Set in 1700, Rowland's outstanding 13th Sano Ichiro mystery (after 2007's The Snow Empress) finds Sano, whom the shogun raised to the rank of chamberlain several books back, waging a fierce struggle with his chief rival, Lord Matsudaira. The stakes are raised at the outset when Matsudaira's forces almost succeed in killing Sano's wife and occasional sleuthing partner, Reiko. The chamberlain soon suspects that someone else may have been behind the attack, but soon he faces a more daunting task.

The Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L. Carter 

Carter, a Yale law professor and distinguished conservative African-American intellectual known for his nonfiction (The Culture of Disbelief), has written a first-rate legal thriller guaranteed to broaden his audience. The narrator, Talcott Garland, is a law professor at Elm Harbor University whose occasional Carteresque editorializing about politics and justice are saved from didacticism by his abiding existential loneliness.

This is a bible for all those people who feel lost and trapped in a world where there is too much certainty and not enough nonsense. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I hope you find some solace and the occasional titter in the ones that I have provided.