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* Cunningham, Michael. Specimen Days. Farrar. Jun. 2005. c.288p. ISBN 0-374-29962-5. $24. F
In this follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, Cunningham offers another dazzling tour de force that examines the intimate ways in which the past is woven into the present and future. Where in The Hours Virginia Woolf was the guiding spirit, here Walt Whitman acts as the characters' Virgil, steering them through the vicissitudes of their lives. In "In the Machine," the first of three interrelated tales set in New York City, 13-year-old Lucas, who almost involuntarily spouts lines of Whitman's verse, confronts grief and the ambiguity of love as he tries to take his …