This title critically reviews old and new literature, help to create greater awareness of the disease in the US and helps in the evaluation of certain epidemiological and public health issues.

During the first half of the 20th century, Chagas disease was assumed to be absent from the U.S. and considered an exotic disease, until the first two indigenous cases were discovered, almost simultaneously, in Texas, 1955. Since that time four indigenous cases have been documented in several places in the country. Although the disease is still considered uncommon in the US, this disease is not longer an exclusive Latin American illness.

Physicians in the US are often unaware of the characteristics of the diseases, and are likely overlooking locally acquired cases. The influx of an estimated 300,000 Latin American immigrants with the Chagas parasite means that there is an urgent need for physicians and public health officials to become aware.
Helps to create greater awareness of Chagas disease in the USAHelps to evaluate epidemiological and public health issuesFacilitates accurate and necessary future public health interventions

With our lives firmly controlled by the steady pace of time, humans have yearned for ways to escape its constraints, and authors have responded with narratives about traveling far into the past or future, reversing the flow of time, or creating alternate universes where Napoleon was triumphant at Waterloo or the South won the Civil War. Writers ranging from Dante and Lewis Carroll to Philip K. Dick and Martin Amis have probed into the workings of time, and an overwhelming desire to master time reverberates throughout popular culture. This book considers how imaginative works involving time and time travel reflect ongoing scientific concerns and examine the human condition.

The scope of the volume is unusually wide, covering such topics as Dante, the major novels of the 19th century, and stories and films of the 1990s. The book concludes with a lengthy bibliography of short stories and novels, films and television programs, and nonfiction works that feature time travel or speculations about time. With a roster of contributors that includes several of the field's major scholars, this book offers many new insights into this fascinating subject.