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The case of Stefan Kiszko casts a dark shadow over British justice. Totally unconnected to the murder of which he was convicted--that of a young girl Lesley Molseed--he spent 16 years in prison tormented as a sex-offender and suffering from what one expert described as 'delusions of innocence'.

Reflecting the enormous depth and breadth of spine surgery, this volume has been completely updated with current, state-of-the-art surgical methodologies and minimally invasive options.Pathologies include degenerative changes, congenital abnormalities, rheumatic diseases, tumors, and trauma.

Crimes motivated by prejudice date to the beginning of human history. Despite legislation addressing bias-driven offenses hate crimes continue to plague modern American society. Beginning with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 six days later, this chronology catalogs hate crimes and the relevant statutes and amendments affecting the definition, prosecution and punishment of hate crimes within the U.S. through 2013. The introduction sketches the history of hate crimes legislation through 1968, while an appendix lists and briefly describes hate crime statutes presently in force in various states. From racial violence and attacks on gays and lesbians to the bombings of abortion clinics by \"\"pro-life\"\" extremists to assaults on Muslims in the wake of 9/11, this reference work lays bare an ugly but critical aspect of American history.

On the other hand, Mr. [Walter Wangerin Jr.] is also a Protestant minister, and his purpose has more in common with Milton's than with those of either Chaucer (from whose comic homily ''The Nun's Priest's Tale'' come Mr. Wangerin's main characters, the proud rooster Chauntecleer and his lovely Pertelote) or the Irish epic the ''Tain-Bo-Cuailnge'' (from whose earliest manuscript, the ''Book of the Dun Cow,'' comes his first title). For in his two-volume fable, Mr. Wangerin is writing nothing less than a parable of the Fall, an attempt, if not to justify God's ways to man, then to ask God to do so Himself. His Wyrm is none other than the great dragon, ''that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan'' of the Book of Revelation. ''Goddamn that Serpent,'' the narrator cries early in ''The Book of Sorrows.'' ''No one had sinned enough to justify his presence in the universe. . . . Mighty God, you talk to us! Tell us: why does Wyrm exist?'' And ''Why? Why?'' is Chautecleer's elegiac refrain. The rooster was once God's troubadour, giving with his canonical crows direction and meaning to creation - but now he is God's accuser, tormented by the lonely burden of authority, by hubris, guilt and self-pitying despair.

In ''A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go'' (surely runner-up to Joyce Carol Oates's ''Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart'' as the longest title of the season), Eddie Ryan runs a mortuary in his home - embalming in his basement, laying out in his living room both neighbors and strangers. Here the departed are always at the center of things, making this book a kind of prose ''Spoon River Anthology'' that moves skillfully through a great range of tonal variations on the subject of burying the dead - the elegiac to the fantastical to the down-home corn pone of hoary jokes and shaggy-dog tales. Like its predecessors (William Faulkner's ''As I Lay Dying,'' Evelyn Waugh's ''Loved One,'' Cathie Pelletier's recent ''Funeral Makers''), Mr. [Robert Olmstead]'s book runs irresistibly to macabre eccentricity, as the inexplicability of the fact of death pushes fictions about its apparatus toward the grotesque. While throughout this novel the reader's perspective is shifted with artful ingenuity (to a dead woman's monologue, a baby boy's nightly talk with God), most centrally we know the citizens and the ghosts of Inverawe through Mr. Olmstead's beautifully nuanced portrait of Eddie Ryan himself, a sensitive, understandably depressed man who wanted to be a poet but ended up in charge of graves registry at Khe Sanh and so became an undertaker - ''constantly trying to bury the dead, but so often they won't cooperate.'' Now middle-aged, Ryan feels unmoored from any clear sense of purpose, caught in confusions over how to account for ''the things we do to each other,'' saddened by memories of his dead alcoholic father, trapped by his own empathy - by his grief for the bereaved, by his desires for his wife, fears for his children. ''How thin it can draw him, living his life and the lives of his children at the same time.'' The plot of ''A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever We Go'' begins when a woodcutter named Cody appears at the Ryans' with a dead body on a snowy Christmas Eve. Cody is a garrulous free spirit who says words are useless, who cries over dead animals he has killed and who thinks men who eat salad should be eliminated by having the Big One dropped on them. Everyone seems to admire Cody (including perhaps a little too much the author himself) and to sense that Cody has somehow achieved true manhood and direction. A perfect teacher prefers him to her own sons - one a doctor, one a lawyer (both ''godawful wimps'') - telling him, ''You are the life most people are destined to only read about.''

While Tiburon keeps up with current fiction, he isn't fond of novels that imitate reality; as he can't possibly know what reality is, he has no desire to copy it. Cultural codes, as well as metaphysical speculations fascinate him. Most of all, Tiburon loves dictionaries. Throughout his tale, our speculative surveyor takes us on side-trips into comparative philology - analyzing the differences in North and South, Dutch and Spanish words, or tracing etymologies - the word ''fairy'' to ''fatum'' (''fate''). Such digressions into semiology are typical in allegorical fiction (compare the chapter on the whiteness of the whale in ''Moby-Dick''). Also typical is the active presence of the tale-teller; ''The Scarlet Letter'' opens with an essay, ''The Custom House,'' that is a third as long as the entire text of ''In the Dutch Mountains,'' and is told by a ''Surveyor of Customs,'' who may in fact be the inspiration for Mr. [Cees Nooteboom]'s surveyor of roads.

Often in memory, the classics of our childhood condense to a few indelible illustrations threaded together by the bare spine of the story's great moments. When most of us think of Robin Hood, we see a jumble of N. C. Wyeth and Lawrence Beall Smith drawings, mixed with incidents from Howard Pyle's ''Merry Adventures'' in our ''Junior Library'' editions, possibly confused with scenes from Scott's (or M-G-M's) ''Ivanhoe,'' and superimposed over it all the bright image of Errol Flynn's cocky laugh right in the pallid face of the discomfited Sheriff of Nottingham. Others may hear the jaunty theme song of the TV series, with its merry men riding through the glen, feared by the bad and loved by the good. No doubt most shocking to traditionalists, Ms. [Robin McKinley]'s Robin is no swordsman, and, worse, he's a mediocre archer who ''can't shoot worth a pig's sneeze.'' Those who remember the zing of Robin's shaft splitting the bull's-eye arrow at the Nottingham Fair archery contest may be a little nonplussed to learn that it is Maid Marian (a far superior archer, not to mention more savvy political strategist) who has entered the contest, disguised as Robin, in order to foster the common folk legend that he is ''one of the old gods come back to save England from the Normans.'' And it is not Robin but Cecily, Will Scarlet's sister, who disarms the infamous Guy of Gisbourne just before that villain is set to slay our hero.