Description: In 14 highly entertaining, often provocative essays, Dutch cardiologist Dunning probes the extremes of human behavior. He contrasts two individuals burnt at the stake--saintly Joan of Arc, driven by hallucinated voices, and her contemporary, Gilles de Rais, a bestial mass murderer who sodomized and killed 150 boys. Dunning ponders how country lass Charlotte Corday, the picture of rosy innocence, cold-bloodedly stabbed to death mass executioner Jean-Paul Marat, symbol of the French Revolution's bloodthirstiness. An extraordinary gallery of geniuses, addicts, martyrs, criminals and lunatics, these gracefully written essays feature tormented composer Gustav Mahler discussing his marital problems with Sigmund Freud; blind Louis Braille inventing the alphabet named after him; French 17th-century saint Marguerite Marie, who had visions of Christ performing a heart transplant operation on her; and drunken poet Paul Verlaine shooting his friend Arthur Rimbaud. Other pieces discuss anorexia nervosa, the castrato's rise and fall in the opera world, the Battle of the Somme, unisexual lizards and virgin birth.

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