Five wayward love stories.What is it we seek in another's flesh—wholeness, transcendence, possession, escape? Can we trust the body's primal intelligence or is lust the fatal trap depicted in classic operas and Victorian novels?In "Rescue Mission" a divorced middle-aged man journeys to a desolate outpost in Africa to win back a childhood sweetheart more interested in apes than in men"Wars of the Flesh" follows the misadventures of a rebellious Swiss teenager who elo...

In the final weeks of 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht and imminent war, a heartsick Italian maestro wrote a love song called "Tu Solamente Tu". Its lyrics lamented his forced separation from his wife, the Hungarian ballerina Margit Wolf, in the wake of Mussolini's edict banishing foreign Jews from Italy. The song, first recorded by Vittorio de Sica in 1939, catapulted to the top of the Hit Parade and earned its composer the moniker "the Italian Cole Porter". The German version, "Du Im...

Jerusalem lies at the end of an ancient Roman road, a city swathed in light and sorrow. Coming to Jerusalem to fulfill her grandfather's dying wish, Eve Cavell finds herself poised on the seam of three worlds — Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. Inspired rather than frightened by the ghosts and warring children that surround her, Eve emerges from mourning to a life larger for its dangers. The lost and alone — an Australian street preacher; a handsome apathetic Palestinian; an alienated Israeli in...

In the final weeks of 1938, in the shadow of Kristallnacht and imminent war, a heartsick Italian maestro wrote a love song called "Tu Solamente Tu". Its lyrics lamented his forced separation from his wife, the Hungarian ballerina Margit Wolf, in the wake of Mussolini's edict banishing foreign Jews from Italy. The song, first recorded by Vittorio de Sica in 1939, catapulted to the top of the Hit Parade and earned its composer the moniker "the Italian Cole Porter". The German version, "Du Im...