Max and Memie are the two principle characters. Max has an Irish father, Harry (Dingle) Bellman, and Latin American mother and grows up in desperately poor circumstances. He is a very bright, level-headed young man with natural social skills. Memie comes from an enormously wealthy background but is orphaned at the age of twelve. Sent off to the Defrugals Graduation School for the Super-Rich, she hates it and rebels against all and everything. Being taught that God is good and communism is bad, she chooses to take an opposing view. She is fearless in the face of danger and spends much time looking for revolutions of one sort or another. Max thinks Memie politically naive but, as friend and bodyguard, is forever trying to pull her back from the brink. By nature, she is difficult and neurotic but shows her caring side from time to time. Throughout there is an underlying sexual tension, but in the end, Max's efforts at keeping Memie safe comes to nothing.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.