In sharply rendered vignettes, Rick Bailey reflects on donuts and ducks, horses and car crashes, outhouses and EKG’s. He travels all night from Michigan to New Jersey to attend the funeral of a college friend dead of AIDS. After a vertiginous climb, he staggers in flipflops across the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. In a trattoria in the hills above the Adriatic he ruminates on the history and glories of beans, from Pythagorus to Thoreau, from the Saginaw valley to the Province of Urbino.