KENNEDY'S BRAIN: THE LIMITED EDITION

Gladestry, United Kingdom: The Scorpion Press, 2007. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. As New/As New Dust Jacket.. Gladestry, United Kingdom: The Scorpion Press, 2007. Hardcover. As New/As New. First Edition/First Printing. 328 pages. The author's "stand-alone" thriller/novel. One of Henning Mankell's finest achievements. Limited Edition of 80 numbered and signed copies. Published as part of the eminently collectible Scorpion Press Series of great contemporary mystery and thriller novels. Precedes and should not be confused with the regular trade edition, British or American. The Limited Edition is now scarce. An austerely elegant production by The Scorpion Press: Regular-sized volume format. Marbled hard boards with maroon leather overboards and gilt titles embossed on spine, as issued. Text by Henning Mankell. Introduction by Dan Fesperman. Green topstain. Printed on archival stock paper in the United Kingdom to the highest standards. In glassine DJ, as issued. Presents, in its Limited Edition collectible format, Henning Mankell's "Kennedy's Brain" in a felicitous English translation. His so-called AIDS novel. A passionate cause on his part, the AIDS crisis led him to publish "I Die, But My Memory Lives On" in 2002. The present title refers to the factual, post-autopsy disappearance of JFK's brain, a metaphor for and an integral element of the narrative. "When Louise Cantor finds her twenty-eight year old son dead in his apartment, everything indicates it was a suicide. Louise, however, refuses to accept this, and with nothing more than few suspicions and a mother's intuition, she and her ex-husband set out to find what happened. What they discover is a dark underworld of people exploiting the victims of the AIDS epidemic: Corrupt businessmen dealing infected blood, suspicious researchers carrying out dangerous tests, and lecherous drug dealers peddling black-market medicine. Their investigation takes them across three continents and leads them into mighty financial institutions and the highest corridors of power, where suddenly their own lives are at stake" (Publisher's blurb). Mankell's overriding theme is evil as the displacement of human values by greed (driven by market forces), by pathology (severe psychic collapse as a result of modernity), and most viciously, by an abstract and misguided "good cause" (well-meaning individuals blinded by something "greater than themselves" and "bigger than humanity"). His evocation of the erosion of the human scale in a "global" world has prompted the great novelist Michael Ondaatje to describe his thrillers as "moral literature". An absolute "must-have" title for Henning Mankell collectors. This is a copy of the Limited Edition, indicated/numbered as such on the Front Limitation Page. It is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen by Henning Mankell. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few copies of the Limited Edition still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare signed copy thus. One of the greatest writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER HENNING MANKELL TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 1873567855.