Most Popular Books by Michael Bishop

Science fiction-roman.

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.

In 1989 Michael Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery that normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer. In this book, Bishop tells us how he and Varmus made their momentous discovery. More than a lively account of the making of a brilliant scientist, How to Win the Nobel Prize is also a broader narrative combining two major and intertwined strands of medical history: the long and ongoing struggles to control infectious diseases and to find and attack the causes of cancer. 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. Bishop then provides an introduction for nonscientists to the molecular underpinnings of cancer and concludes with an analysis of many of today''s most important science-related controversies--ranging from stem cell research to the attack on evolution to scientific misconduct. How to Win the Nobel Prize affords us the pleasure of hearing about science from a brilliant practitioner who is a humanist at heart. Bishop''s perspective will be valued by anyone interested in biomedical research and in the past, present, and future of the battle against cancer.

After the death of her husband, Mary Stevenson "Stevie" Crye supports her two children in their small Georgia town by becoming a freelance writer. But when her typewriter breaks, she begins receiving demonic messages through the machine and uncovers a curse over the Crye household.

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 wide-ranging study of Prévert’s promethean imagination and creativity in the interwoven realms of theatre, film, poetry, art, photography, and song, Michael Bishop’s Jacques Prévert seeks to demonstrate the originality of a genial fabricator of image and word whose essential focus, unpretentious yet urgently felt, unintellectualised yet buoyantly and wittily intelligent, ever remains the quality of our daily being-in-the-world, the possibility of our self-transformation, the stunning availability – should we truly will it, and despite all that can weigh upon existence, above all ideologically – of joy and love and freedom.

SCIENCE FICTION: The evolution of 21st century Atlanta from Utopia to tyranny through the lives of its citizens.

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.

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.

Contemporary French Women Poets offers the first full-length study, divided into two volumes, of a wide range of women''s poetry in France written over the past forty years. Volume I provides a broad Introduction, eight chapters devoted to individual critical assessments of the work of Andrée Chedid, Heather Dohollau, Denise Le Dantec, Janine Mitaud, Jacqueline Risset, Anne Teyssiéras, Esther Tellermann and Marie-Claire Bancquart, followed by a provisional Conclusion and Bibliography. Volume II recentres the overall analysis via a brief Introduction, then proceeds to offer eight more individual critical evaluations of the work of Jeanne Hyvard, Jeannine Baude, Françoise Hàn, Céline Zins, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Denise Borias, Marie Etienne and Anne-Marie Albiach. An overall Conclusion is then developed, followed by a Bibliography.