"Aaliya Sohbi lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family's 'unnecessary appendage.' Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read-- by anyone. After overhearing her neighbors, 'the three witches,' discussing her too-white hair, Aaliya...

"'Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn't get fixed.' So says Pauline Green, president of the United States. A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country's secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Struggling to prevent the outbreak of a world war are a young woman intelligence officer; a spy working undercover...

Discusses how to avoid harmful medical mistakes, offering advice on such topics as working with a busy doctor, communicating the full story of an illness, evaluating test risks, and obtaining a working diagnosis.