Joshua Son of None Author:Nancy Freedman It opens in Dallas in November 1963. The dying President has been brought to the hospital where Thor Bitterbaum, the third-year surgical resident, stands by in disbelief. Quickly, he takes some material from the gaping neck wound, puts it in a Pyrex tube and leaves. Within hours he is in California, where the research on clonin... more »g (asexual duplication of an individual from a single cell of an original) has been most advanced. He finds Gerald Kellogg, rich and politically ambitious, who agrees to finance the experiment in the hope of having a son who will become President of the United States. Nine months later Joshua Kellogg is born.
To insure the success of the scheme, the father and the scientist set about recreating the events of the late President's life--sibling rivalries, manufactured disasters and even physical injuries included. Manipulating young Joshua is a dangerous game, and in time it becomes a desperate one, sparking a chain of events that moves on its own inexorable course.
The replication of a human being-or a clonee as Joshua comes to be known-the creation of an exact background, and the programming of a life are the predictable aspects of Bitterbaum's plan. But the conflict between men who attempt to control another's destiny, human frailty and ambition, the emergence of the human spirit, and the vagaries of life itself are forces that could not have been foreseen.
This is a truly hypnotic story of men who dare to step beyond the laws of nature. A dazzling feat of imagination, Joshua Son of None is packed with tension and suspense and will keep the reader turning pages from the compelling first to the inevitable last.« less