Most Popular Books by Michael Bishop

"Alongside his own story, that of a youthful humanist evolving into an ambivalent medical student, an accidental microbiologist, and finally a world-class researcher, Bishop gives us a fast-paced and engrossing tale of the microbe hunters. It is a narrative enlivened by vivid anecdotes about our deadliest microbial enemies - the Black Death, cholera, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, HIV - and by biographical sketches of the scientists who led the fight against these scourges.".

Joshua Kampa, the illegitimate son of a mute Spanish whore and a black serviceman, has always dreamed of Africa. But his dreams are of an Africa far in the past and are so vivid and in such hallucinatory detail that he is able to question the understanding of eminent paleontologists. As a result, Joshua is invited to join a most unusual time travel project and is transported millions of years into the past of his dreams. In early Pleistocene Africa, living among the pre-human species Homo habilis, experiencing the same hardships and the same intense pleasures, Joshua finds, for the first time in his troubled life, not only contentment but real love - a love that transcends almost everything. Intelligent, thoughtful and deeply moving, No Enemy but Time brilliantly evokes the remote past and, at the same time, presents a powerful and convincing portrayal of a relationship surmounting even the most daunting barriers. It is a challenging and highly original novel exploring the nature a nd origins of humankind.

Seth Latimer, a human member of a family of clones representing a far-future interstellar commercial combine, finds himself marooned on Gla Taus with no way home unless he joins a mission to a neighboring world to negotiate the transfer of a minority population from one planet to the other. The lure of trade expansion versus the grip of local custom and belief sets the story in motion. Secrets and treacherous intentions boil to the surface as diplomacy devolves into brutal expediency against a background of complex gender and religious polarization. The colorful details of alien settings and cultures are lovingly woven into this story of passionate individuals caught up in the sweep of history toward tragedy, change, and eventual renewal.

Between the incessant music of the stars and the spectre of a giant squid caught inside a locket ball, it is difficult for Don Horacio to maintain a restful mind. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In this heartfelt science-fiction homage, Philip K. Dick dies in 1982 in Santa Ana, California, during the fourth term of the repressive imperial presidency of Richard Milrose Nixon. Soon thereafter, stripped of his memory, Dick turns up in the office of Lia Bonner, a young psychotherapist in Warm Springs, Georgia. Ultimately, Dick manifests at Von Braunville, the American moon base, as a key figure in a gonzo conspiracy to trigger a "redemptive shift" of world-changing scope. Indeed, according to The New York Times, the ending of Michael Bishop''s wittily inventive Dickian extravaganza "approaches sublimity."

From the reviews: "Bishop and Schroder (both, Univ. of Nebraska at Omaha) have brought together an impressive group of practitioners in the relatively new application of geographic information science to mountain geomorphology. In doing so, they have produced valuable, first, overall coverage of a high-tech approach to mountain, three-dimensional research. More than 40 contributing authors discuss a wide range of related aspects.... The book is well bound and well produced; each chapter provides an extensive source of references. The numerous line drawings are clearly reproduced, although the mediocre quality of photographic reproduction limits the value of air photographs and satellite images. As is characteristic of many edited collections, there is some variation in chapter quality. Some of the writing is so dense that it requires minute concentration--one chapter, for instance, has 14 pages of references from a total of 43 pages. Nevertheless, this is a vital compendium for a rapidly expanding field of research. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals." (J. D. Ives, Choice, March 2005)

A private citizen discovers compelling evidence that a decades-old murder in Nashville was not committed by the man who went to prison for the crime but was the result of a conspiracy involving elite members of Nashville society. Nashville 1964. Eighteen-year-old babysitter Paula Herring is murdered in her home while her six-year-old brother apparently sleeps through the grisly event. A few months later a judge''s son is convicted of the crime. Decades after the slaying, Michael Bishop, a private citizen, stumbles upon a secret file related to the case and with the help of some of the world''s top forensic experts--including forensic psychologist Richard Walter (aka "the living Sherlock Holmes")--he uncovers the truth. What really happened is completely different from what the public was led to believe. Now, for the very first time, Bishop reveals the true story. In this true-crime page-turner, the author lays out compelling evidence that a circle of powerful citizens were key participants in the crime and the subsequent cover-up. The ne''er-do-well judge''s son, who was falsely accused and sent to prison, proved to be the perfect setup man. The perpetrators used his checkered history to conceal the real facts for over half a century. Including interviews with the original defense attorney and a murder confession elicited from a nursing-home resident, the information presented here will change Nashville history forever.

Sonny Peacock comes of age in this poignant tale set in the Kansas heartland of the early 1960s. ''Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana'' is set in 1980s Pretoria, South Africa, where a black man''s quest for the ''Theory of Everything'' is juxtaposed against the inhumanity of apartheid. In ''Cri de Coeur'', aboard a 21st century generation wheel ship, agrogeologist and poet Dr Abel Gwiazda and his Down''s-syndrome son Dean travel on course for a new home in Epsilon Eridani. In the final novella, ''Death and Designation Among the Asadi'', reprinted here for the first time in 20 years, ethnologist Egan Chaney''s private journals of his studies of the alien Asadi are the centrepiece of the story.

This retrospective Michael Bishop collection of fifty short pieces (thirty-four stories, fifteen poems or prose-poems, and one amusing Moon-based play about writing SF, "The Grape Jelly and Mustard Method") spans the author''s entire career, from "Asytages''s Dream," written while Bishop was a college student, to "Yahweh''s Hour," an acerbic but moving work of science-fantasy political satire composed in 2020. The collection''s most distinctive attribute, however, lies in the fact that no contribution is longer than 3,000 words and most are shorter, a kind of Palm-of-the-Hand Stories for lovers of short fiction, heartfelt pieces that afford the reader as much meat as they do flash. "A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals," set on Saturn''s largest moon, Titan, embodies a requiem for the entire human species. "Philip K. Dick is dead, a lass" memorializes in verse science fiction''s preeminent bard of the reality breakdown." "Love''s Heresy" and "The Library of Babble" appear to be channeling the labyrinthine mind of Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with surprising jinks all their own. And the list of narrative explorations grows and grows . . . Humor and horror, music and whimsy, primates and pathology, mice and men, religion and rebellion: these stories and poems cover the waterfront of human experience while acknowledging the singularity of each human life.

"Seasonal coastal currents on a continental shelf are modeled for use in Search and Rescue planning. The model considers a balance of Coriolis, pressure gradient, and frictional forces. Input parameters are the climatological wind and density fields. Comparison of results to currents depicted on climatological atlases for the New York Bight indicates the validity of the approach. In this light, one might extend this approach to other geographical regions where analogous oceanographic conditions prevail."--Author''s abstract.

This is a story about Brooklyn—about a young man who grew up in a neighborhood called Crown Heights. It is a story of an ordinary kid who fell in love with music; first the music he heard at home, then with the music of the streets. This street music had been bubbling up around the city for nearly 10 years before the kid discovered it at a block party one summer evening. It was loud, infectious, and alive. The crazy thing was this music was really familiar but different at the same time. This crazy new kind of music grabbed the boy’s attention and lit a fire in him that would never be put out. This music didn’t have a name but later became known as Hip Hop.

In Earth and Mind : Dreaming, Writing, Being Michael Bishop examines the very recent work of nine major contemporary French and Francophone writers : Yves Bonnefoy, Jacqueline Risset, Salah Stétié, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Tahar Ben Jelloun, André Velter, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Jean-Claude Pinson and Jacques Dupin. The issue of writing’s complex relation to the experience of the earth is of central pertinence, involving questions of dreaming, voice, figurativity, emotion, desire, revolt, metaphysics, meaning, poiein and being. Discussion entails close reading of works as well as broad contextualisation and a sensitivity to interrelevancies from writer to writer. Bishop’s book is intended as a companion to his 2014 Dystopie et poïein, agnose et reconnaissance. Seize études sur la poésie française et francophone contemporaine.

For Mary Stevenson Crye, a beautiful young housewife, life had been wonderful. Loving husband, two delightful children, meaningful existence in a small Southern community. Then it all fell apart: with the sudden, unexpected death of her husband, Stevie must struggle to earn a living as a free-lance writer. When her typewriter - the sole economic support for her surviving family - breaks down, Stevie begins to receive demonic messages through the machine, the prelude to a living nightmare of satanic emissaries, ghouls from beyond the grave, and the revelation of an unrequited curse over the Crye household. For Mary Stevenson Crye, the nightmare is about to begin . . .