What is death and why does it matter to us? How should the knowledge of our finitude affect the living of our lives and what are the virtues suitable to mortal beings? Does death destroy the meaningfulness of lives, or would lives that never ended be eternally and absurdly tedious? Should we reconcile ourselves to the fact of our forthcoming death, or refuse to "go gently into that good night"?
Finding refuge in a quiet rural backwater, Dr David Hunter hoped he might at last have put the past behind him. But then they found what was left of Sally Palmer. It isn't just that she was a friend that disturbs him. Once he'd been a high-profile forensic anthropologist and all too familiar with the many faces of death, before tragedy made him abandon this previous life.
It was an ordinary-looking photograph. Just the portrait of a man. But the very sight of it chilled Allon to the bone. Art restorer and sometime spy Gabriel Allon is sent to Vienna to authenticate a painting, but the real object of his search becomes something else entirely: to find out the truth about the photograph that has turned his world upside down. It is the face of the unnamed man who brutalized his mother in the last days of World War II, during the Death March from Auschwitz. But is it really the same one? If so, who is he? How did he escape punishment? Where is he now?
Charles S. Peirce was a thinker of great originality and power. Although unpubliced in his lifetime, he was recognized as an equal by such men as William James and John Dewey and, since his death in1914, he has come to the forefront of American philosophy.
