The stories in Call Me Ahab by Anne Finger are intelligent and sharp.  Finger takes characters from history (including Frida Kahlo, Helen Keller, Rosa Luxembourg, Gramsci, and an imagined Ned Ludd, namesake of the Luddites) and from literature (including Ishmael and Ahab) and uses them to craft time-spanning parables of love, sorrow, struggle, and achievement.  Finger forges connections between these real and imagined people, archetypes of strength and willfulness against all odds, and makes them both more human and more admirable.  Pitting them against new struggles and inner challenges, Finger brings her characters — and her readers — to a new understanding of what it takes to play a part in history, both the chance of it all and the inherent inner force that drives a person onward.  Whether the force creates change or beauty or grace, or falls flat and unrealized, there is no question that in the striving to fulfill their desires, the characters rise above the mediocre, the placid, the mundane.  There is not a mundane character in the lot; they are interesting in every way, complex and difficult, and driven in different ways, through different desires and aptitudes but sharing the certainty — and the exultation — of desiring something more.