Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
"When I was 16, Helen Fleischman assigned me to memorize Shakespeares Sonnet No. 29, When in disgrace with fortune and mens eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state for English class, and fifty years later, that poem is still in my head. Algebra got washed away, and geometry and most of biology, but those lines about the redemptive power of love in the face of shame are still here behind my eyeballs, more permanent than my own teeth. The sonnet is a durable good.