Any summary of this novel is inadequate, as Kraft's story is played against a millennial survey of the history of the world's mistreatment of children that includes the Children's Crusade, the Pied Piper of Hamlin, the Lost Boys of Neverland, the evacuation of children from London during World War II, the deaths of children in the forests of Laos/Cambodia, and the carnage of rioting in today's U.S. cities. The world has always been hostile to children and childhood, and we collude with history by turning the atrocities of war, disease, and abandonment into fairy tales and epic. Kraft is placed in a position where he must face this realization not only as a person but as a physician who encounters the world's inhumanity to children on a daily basis.

This is a hard book to read, for the unrelenting brutality it reveals, for Kraft's own struggles with his emotional relation to his patients, and for the densely allusive and metaphoric language the author uses. Richard Powers, a recipient of a MacArthur fellowship for his writing who frequently tackles scientific themes that relate to the medical sciences, drew on the experience of his brother, a physician whose residency included working in an L.A. emergency room during a time of rioting. Operation Wandering Soul requires slow--and multiple--reading, but it repays richly.