The Burial of My Cat II tells the story of a young man as he wanders through the first few years of his life. It begins the day he becomes aware of the future. He remembers a good bit of what has gone on before and recognizes the names and faces of his cousins and uncles and while he feels on friendly ground, he senses everything will now depend on him. He feels insecure and for the first time in his life worries about what lies ahead. Those around him mark no change. He is just a nice little boy growing up as he should.

Dormont Borough, incorporated in 1909, had slightly less than 10,000 citizens when I lived there in the 1950's. It had no streets, only avenues, and many of them named after the states of the union-like a Monopoly board. Its two connected business districts on Potomac and West Liberty Avenues provided tidy commercial areas that filled the needs of its citizens. I once counted 14 bars. And most prominent of all, Dormont's 26-acre park stood at the heart of the borough. It had a huge swimming pool, a number of athletic fields and many alcoves to hide in. Picnics, sports events, dances, sled riding, proms at the bathhouse, fireworks on Memorial Day (which we typically called Dormont Day) gave its citizens an extraordinarily encapsulated experience. From our point of view, Dormont Park, and, in fact, Dormont itself, was complete.

In 1959, the Eighty-one year old Bell System that had exclusively served America's communications needs was one of the country's most revered institutions, having served the country brilliantly with its research, its inventions and the only decent telephone service in the world at the time. A dozen Nobel Prize winners developed the transistor, radio astronomy, the laser and discovered cosmic background radiation at the edge of the universe. But the days of glory were ending, as growing central control began to strangle the company and change it from innovative and forward-looking to a reactionary, insular and hide-bound bureaucracy. By the mid-1960s, it took seven years to bring out a pink plastic Princess telephone.

The Janjaweed, Arabic for devil on horseback, are the Sudan-supported gunmen who have murdered, raped and tortured African villagers in Darfur for the past decade. By the start of 2011, the stalemate of the previous two years began to unravel and Janjaweed began raiding and burning villages randomly. Southern Sudan had voted to secede and Khartoum was determined not to lose Darfur. There appeared to be no hope for the beleaguered African villagers. Then, in an arbitrary raid, the Sudanese air force missed its target and dropped a screen of bombs, meant for a camp in western Darfur, into the desert on the Chadian border. The crater created by the raid changed everything.

In 1959 Ray Smith joined the 340th Engineers unaware that he might be expected to fight on a nuclear battlefield. After an eventful Basic Training, Ray was ordered to a Fort Gordon Georgia unit named after the Reserve Forces Act (RFA #1). There, 470 low-ranking enlisted men, mostly college graduates, were supervised by a first lieutenant, a sergeant and a corporal who ran the mail room. All were unmotivated "short-timers" whose interests were comfort, sleep and counting the days, not unlike characters from previous generations-No Time for Sergeants, Biloxi Blues or M*A*S*H-except that one day, with a few weeks remaining in their enlistment, the RFA #1 boys were told that they were to become Pentomic warriors modeled after the 101st Airborne Division.

The spring flowering of the town had not yet begun when Calvin Moore turned up dead, rolled inside a carpet in the Swarthmore College outdoor amphitheater. A worker found him naked, covered with blue paint and the number seven scratched in his stomach. Assembly, an informal discussion group, was the most unlikely group imaginable to become involved in a murder investigation. Nonetheless, the women, ranging in age from 28 to 94, approached the task with the sturdy, determined approach with which they prosecuted the rest of their lives.