Featherless

<p><span style=color: rgba(10 10 9 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Plato famously defined a human being as a featherless biped. It's hard not to sense the ironic humor in this definition a reminder that for all our talk about human dignity our condition is contingent vulnerable and at some level even comic.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(10 10 9 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Perhaps that's why the writer A.G. Mojtabai-known for her dry understated subtly humorous but ultimately honest and courageous depictions of the human condition-chose the name for her latest novel set in the confines of Shady Rest Home for the Aged.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(10 10 9 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Mojtabai offers us a varied cast of characters at Shady Rest including: Eli who fancies himself a ladies man; Elora anxious about her wayward nephew; the aloof but lonely scholar Wiktor; and Maddie a bit eccentric true but more wise and compassionate than most. At the center of it all is Daniel an old soul in a young man's body with a strange gift for caring for the elderly.</span></p><p><em style=color: rgba(10 10 9 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Featherless</em><span style=color: rgba(10 10 9 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> is one of those rare books that brings us news from the final frontier the end of life. Its unflinching but humane gaze-informed by the author's own experience-serves as a fitting capstone for a literary career of uncommon distinction.</span></p>