Reginald 'Lefty" Sanford, a famed Negro Leagues baseball player and pitcher from yesteryear, dies and his remains are questionably frozen in a cryonics facility in Arizona, potentially against his 'last wishes." An employee/ medical technician, Jonathan Bishop of the cryonics company, Mizaronics, is fired unexpectedly after revealing a catastrophic event that occurred during the preservation of Sanford - a breach of protocol for whole body internment. Amongst public outrage, Rachel Geary, a young newspaper reporter in Phoenix, and a well-known Black baseball biographer from Detroit, Wesley Thomas Washington, champion the effort of 'freeing" Reggie Sanford from his 'frozen casket of absurdity." Ironically, Wesley Washington also elicits the advocacy of a now elderly, former Red Sox icon, Ted Williams, a national hero and friend of Sanford. Williams, is retired in Florida, but willing to assist. The unscrupulous plot involves questionable medical vivisection and desecration of cadavers - science fiction that breaches bioethical standards and state-regulated mortuary practices. Futuristic cryonicists that entice the sick and elderly into submitting their bodies to an unproven technology of internment demean traditional funeral arrangements. Their belief is a future return to life in another millennium - a world where cloning and nanotechnology will cure all diseases that killed them. Industrial terrorism leads to sabotage and the theft of a critical biological sample. Jonathan Bishop goes public, having stolen confidential records and photos related to Sanford. The abduction of a key character in the book elicits a love story of incredible devotion, akin to Shakespeare's, Romeo and Juliet. 'Reggie" Sanford becomes a pawn in the rapid-paced 'chiller" that leaves the reader questioning the validity of what is medically defined as, life and death, versus the definition that futurists have placed their bets on - a state of limbo where the immortality of Man is the inevitable future. The action-packed mystery 'chiller" questions who legally controls ones' remains after death. The non-validated cryonics myth and deception is currently in use today, albeit denounced by modern medical researchers, cryobiology experts and peer-reviewed scientific thought. Sadly, the U.S. and State governments have done nothing to formally denounce the sanctimonious charade.
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
J.P. Polidoro, Ph.D. is the author of nine novels to date. His mysteries are New England based, and medical or murder related, often with sinister motives, incorporating his background knowledge of medical research and biology. His graduate degrees are from the University of Massachusetts, Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences. Dr. Polidoro is a novelist, songwriter/ performer, photographer and poet. See Amazon.com, and www.longtailpublishing.com for his other novels /books. By day, Dr. Polidoro works in the biopharmaceutical industry, in toxicology. Dr. Polidoro resides in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire, with his wife and children.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A mishmash of misconceptions,
By A Knowledgeable Cryonicist (Michigan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brain Freeze - 321 (Paperback)
This book appears to me as a sustained attack on cryonics.If cryonicists are an ethnic group, I believe this is a classic piece of hate literature, whose prime intent is to generate hostility against cryonicists. The novel is a parody of the cryopreservation of Ted Williams by the cryonics organization Alcor. The true wishes of Ted Williams to be cryopreserved were not as well documented as they should have been (although two out of three of Ted's children gave sworn statements to the court that their father really wanted to be cryopreserved). The author is apparently one of those who chose to believe the third (estranged) child, and this may be the source of his hostility. The book contains many sections devoted to an attempt to debunk the science behind cryonics. In my view, the author's ignorance of biomedical science and his misconceptions of cryonics technology make him into an inept debunker. But his mind seems to be additionally clouded with emotion because every supposedly scientific analysis is permeated with expressions of nausea and disgust. We are told that the blood brain barrier is composed of "tight cellular junctions between each brain cell and neuron" (the BBB is actually tight junctions of endothelial cells). He mistakenly claims that the BBB cannot be crossed by vitrifying cryoprotectants. The author insists that vitrification results in freezing damage, despite the fact that at the 2005 meeting of the Society of Cryobiology a cryobiologist announced that he had vitrified a rabbit kidney to -135oC and transplanted the kidney into a rabbit (after rewarming and cryoprotectant washout) with full kidney functionality. If the author thinks scientists uniformly vilify cryonics, he should take a look at the Scientists' Open Letter on Cryonics. The Wikipedia entry on cryonics or a Google search on cryonics is a better place to learn about the science and technology of cryonics than this mishmash of misconceptions clouded by hostility. Characters in a novel are puppets in the hands of the novelist, so it is not surprising that the cryonics leader is arrogant, rude and insulting -- easy to hate. A valid critique of cryonicists would present them as they are (at worst deluded, but sincere), not as cultists with evil motives. The depiction of the commandos who raid the cryonics facility to steal a cryopreserved head is an extraordinary piece of confused characterization for a novelist. He portrays them as both idealists and extortionists. Why would they demand money and the release of Reggie's torso in exchange for Reggie's head? Why could they not have taken both the head and the torso in such a skillfully-executed raid? The skilled commandos turn into incompetant slobs when it suits the author's purpose -- to be disgusting when they rape the heroine. Their motives make little sense. What do they hope to achieve by exchanging a cryopreserved torso for the life of the heroine? Are they suicidal idealists or disgusting extortionists? The author makes a happy ending for himself: the hero flies a fuel-laden plane into the cryonics facility, incinerating all inside, as well as ruining the lives of the hero and heroine -- leaving the reader with more reasons to despise the cryonicists who are blamed.
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What a sad piece of work!,
By
This review is from: Brain Freeze - 321 (Paperback)
It's sad when a has-been journalist grabs a story that he hopes will attract nationwide attention, and he ends up publishing his book through an obscure imprint, generating virtually no interest except from a few close friends (who perhaps may feel sufficiently obligated to write reviews ... the "five star" ratings are themselves a giveaway, since it is inconceivable that anyone could rate this pathetic book as "excellent.")As for the story: Based on utterly half-baked knowledge of its subject matter, deriving its plot from bad Hollywood cliches.
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
It is a shame,
By
This review is from: Brain Freeze - 321 (Paperback)
Poorly written, a waste of time and money. It is a shame that this clown Polidoro is trying to cash in on the Ted Williams ordeal. He has from the very start exploited an unfortunate event, for his own gain. It seems that he has tried to use the media to associated himself with one of the daughters of Ted Williams as well as the guy who worked for the Arizona company who exposed what had happened while freezing the baseball hero. Polidoro has gone to great lengths to promote himself as an authority figure for all of these unfortunate events when in reality most of his information is easily found on the Internet.
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