| Summary: |
Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an omen, a prophecy, an act of God. To the West, they were freaks; to the East they were either evidence of God's glory or proof of his wrath. Uniquely cursed, born with an affliction the likes of which the world had never seen, they were a joke of nature variously feared and abhorred, disturbing our most basic assumptions about the human condition. In a stunning feat of literary invention, Mark Slouka peers behind the twins' physicality to reveal lives of ordinary grace and suffering, more familiar than strange, illuminating for perhaps the first time the unmistakably human hearts and souls of the two young boys, and later men, whose monstrous birth sent midwives screaming from the room. |
