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"The metamorphosis of Kafka's Gregor Samsa from fabric salesman to cockroach was surely one of the momentous transformations of the modern world. And for almost a century it has seemed that we lost someone dear when the Samsas' chambermaid claimed to sweep into the dustbin the twentieth century's most remarkable contemplative." "Now, in Marc Estrin's debut, we find, instead, that she spirited Gregor from his bedchamber and sold him to a Viennese sideshow." In these continuously surprising pages, Estrin's Gregor tests out his insect state, not only in Vienna, where Musil and Wittgenstein, Spengler, Einstein, and Rilke all help him define his goals. He flies to America, into the crazy rhythm of Prohibition, the Scopes and Sacco-Vanzetti trials, Alice Paul's feminist movement, and the KKK. In New York, he works with Charles Ives, that mad genius composer and insurance magnate. In Washington, he joins the FDR brain trust at its most volatile moment. And what comes of that is nothing less than the explosive birth of modern conscience. This original work of imagination, compassion, and good reason is an ambitious - and enlightening - human comedy.