Even if it cost you your freedom, your life, your youth. To do something for someone or something you loved - England or Shakespeare or a dog or the Hodbins or history - wasn't a sacrifice at all. Like I must have looked there in the rubble with Sir Godfrey, my hand pressed against his heart. Like Mike must have looked in Kent, composing engagement announcements and letters to the editor. Like Eileen had looked, telling Polly she'd decided to stay. As if he was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do. Like Colin helping Mr Dunworthy across the wreckage. Like Ernest Shackleton, setting out in that tiny boat across icy seas. : Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit. He looked like Captain Faulknor must have looked, lashing the ships together.

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He looked instead like Marjorie had looked telling Polly she'd joined the Nursing Service, like Mr Humphreys had looked filling buckets with water and sand to save Saint Paul's, like Miss Laburnum had looked that day she came to Townsend Brothers with the coats. Doomsday Book Willis, Connie Published byBantam Spectra, New York, 1992 ISBN 10: 0553351672ISBN 13: 9780553351675 Seller: Browse Awhile Books, Tipp City, OH, U.S.A. Or even like someone determined to 'do his bit'. He didn't look - in spite of the crown of thorns - like someone making a sacrifice. Together, they battle their invisible enemy with only the crudest weapons, and, when those inevitably fail, faith.“She had been wrong in thinking Christ had been called up against his will to fight in a war. Kivrin, who has been inoculated against the plague, helps the local priest, Father Roche, care for the dying in her adoptive town. As the plague scythes through the English countryside that winter of 1348, the bells ring until it seems they might never stop. They ring for holidays, they ring for weddings - and they ring for the dead, so that the sound might guide their souls to heaven. And yet, when I recalled Connie Willis' groundbreaking, Hugo Award-winning science-fiction novel Doomsday Book, the resonances came back to me with the sound of tolling bells.īells ring throughout Doomsday Book - they mark the hours in the small medieval village in which the time-traveling heroine Kivrin Engle has been stranded, awaiting rescue from her contemporaries in Oxford of the 2050s. It is hard for me to conceive of the bravery required to take care of people with this awful, contagious disease. Many sobering statistics have emerged from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, but one number in particular has stuck with me: More than 200 health care workers have died so far.

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