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Showing 1 - 9 of 9 items
By Carl Sagan. 1977
Essays by an award-winning scientist about the possible development of human intelligence, written for nonspecialists. Discusses the biological functions of…
sleep, increasing brain size, and language learning among chimpanzees. Chronicles advances in understanding the brain and implications for the future. BestsellerBy Susan Merrill Squier. 2004
Embryo adoptions, stem cells capable of transforming into any cell in the human body, intra- and inter-species organ transplantation--these and…
other biomedical advances have unsettled ideas of what it means to be human, of when life begins and ends. In the first study to consider the cultural impact of the medical transformation of the entire human life span, Susan Merrill Squier argues that fiction--particularly science fiction--serves as a space where worries about ethically and socially charged scientific procedures are worked through. Indeed, she demonstrates that in many instances fiction has anticipated and paved the way for far-reaching biomedical changes. Squier uses the anthropological concept of liminality--the state of being on the threshold of change, no longer one thing yet not quite another--to explore how, from the early twentieth century forward, fiction and science together have altered not only the concept of the human being but the contours of human life. Drawing on archival materials of twentieth-century biology; little-known works of fiction and science fiction; and twentieth- and twenty-first century U. S. and U. K. government reports by the National Institutes of Health, the Parliamentary Advisory Group on the Ethics of Xenotransplantation, and the President's Council on Bioethics, she examines a number of biomedical changes as each was portrayed by scientists, social scientists, and authors of fiction and poetry. Among the scientific developments she considers are the cultured cell, the hybrid embryo, the engineered intrauterine fetus, the child treated with human growth hormone, the process of organ transplantation, and the elderly person rejuvenated by hormone replacement therapy or other artificial means. Squier shows that in the midst of new phenomena such as these, literature helps us imagine new ways of living. It allows us to reflect on the possibilities and perils of our liminal lives.By Michael S. Graziano, Lisa M. Graziano. 2008
"...An adventure-filled journey... In spite of its references to hard academic science, Cretaceous Dawn is a first-class adventure story, an…
effortless read as engaging as vintage Jules Verne. The descriptive prose is both evocative and illuminating, and the plot has enough twists and cliffhangers to keep readers traveling on to the inevitable conclusion."--Natural History "The Grazianos, sibling scientists, combine speculation and science in a compulsively page-turning time-travel adventure. A physics experiment gone awry sends four people and a dog 65 million years into the past. Day-to-day survival among creatures like giant croc Deinosuchus and T. rex becomes a priority, even as the group of stranded scientists realizes that getting home involves a 1,000 mile trek across the amazing landscape of Hell Creek. Details about plants, animals and insects in the distant past set the stage for a tight, scientifically plausible plot with a wholly unexpected twist that will keep readers guessing."--Publishers Weekly A long-extinct beetle appears in a physics lab. Four-and-a-half people and a dog are hurled 65 million years through time, to the Age of the Dinosaurs, and paleontologist Julian Whitney and his companions have only one chance for rescue. Meanwhile in the lab, police chief Sharon Earles must solve the mystery of why half a body remains where five people had just been. Physicists try to determine what went wrong but can they fix the vault in time to retrieve the missing people--and do they want to? "A rip-snorting good yarn. . . . Cretaceous Dawn's strength is its ability to transport the reader back in time to truly experience the Cretaceous."--Dinosaur News "Rendered with a clarity and vividness that gives the novel its richness, Cretaceous Dawn is plain fun, and educational at that. Short of time travel, this is as close as you'll ever get to the grim, predatory world of the Cretaceous."--Falmouth Enterprise "From the Inland Sea to the infant Rocky Mountains, we see the entirety of a long-gone ecosystem. The authors' scientific knowledge gives the story, and the giant creatures it is centered around, a realism that is immensely entertaining."--Prehistoric Times "[The era is] described so vividly the reader forgets that no human overlapped with a dinosaur in the sands of time."--The Cape Cod Chronicle Lisa M. Graziano, PhD, is a freelance editor and writer living on Cape Cod, Mass. She spent ten years as a professor of oceanography in Woods Hole, Mass. before turning to a full-time writing career. Michael S. A. Graziano, PhD, is a neuroscientist at Princeton University. He is the author of both fiction and nonfiction.By Leslie J Moran. 2021
Law, Judges and Visual Culture analyses how pictures have been used to make, manage and circulate ideas about the judiciary…
through a variety of media from the sixteenth century to the present. This book offers a new approach to thinking about and making sense of the important social institution that is the judiciary. In an age in which visual images and celebrity play key roles in the way we produce, communicate and consume ideas about society and its key institutions, this book provides the first in-depth study of visual images of judges in these contexts. It not only examines what appears within the frame of these images; it also explores the impact technologies and the media industries that produce them have upon the way we engage with them, and the experiences and meanings they generate. Drawing upon a wide range of scholarship – including art history, film and television studies, and social and cultural studies, as well as law – and interviews with a variety of practitioners, painters, photographers, television script writers and producers, as well as court communication staff and judges, the book generates new and unique insights into making, managing and viewing pictures of judges. Original and insightful, Law, Judges and Visual Culture will appeal to scholars, postgraduates and undergraduates from a variety of disciplines that hold an interest in the role of visual culture in the production of social justice and its institutions.By Charlotte Wood. 2015
'Savage: think Atwood in the outback' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train'An unforgettable reading experience' Liane Moriarty,…
author of Big Little Lies'Ferocious... recalls the early Elena Ferrante' NPR'A masterpiece' Guardian'Devastating' EconomistShe hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.'The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised.He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'"Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a brokendownproperty in the middle of a desert.Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be therewith eight other girls, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers.Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: ineach girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man.They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months,it becomes clear only the girls can rescue themselves. Winner, 2016 Stella PrizeWinner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year AwardWinner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Book AwardWinner, 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for FictionWinner, Reader's Choice, 2016 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary AwardShortlisted, 2016 ABA Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice AwardLonglisted, 2017 International Dublin Literary AwardBy Richard Preston. 1997
A deadly virus - and a desperate race against time.'One of the most horrifying things I've ever read in my…
entire life' Stephen KingOne spring morning in New York City a seventeen-year-old student wakes up feeling vaguely ill. Hours later she is having violent seizures, blood is pouring out of her nose, and she begins to attack her own body in the most hideous way imaginable. Soon, other gruesome deaths of a similar nature have been discovered, and the autopsies reveal that a previously unknown virus is at large. It replicates horribly fast, it is always fatal - and is just too efficient to be entirely natural.When the Centre for Disease Control sends a forensic pathologist to investigate, her discoveries precipitate a national crisis.THE COBRA EVENT is a dramatic, heart-stopping thriller of an all-too-real threat.By Terry Nation. 1976
Survivors of a global plague battle for life on an empty planet. A gripping vision of a post-apocalyptic world...'A fine…
piece of British post-apocalyptic fiction' 'Nation's novel is based on his original cult series...and is all the better for it, being far, far more gritty and realistic' SUNDAY SUNA virus has wiped out 95 per cent of the world's population in just a few weeks, leaving the remaining 5 per cent to stay alive in a world devoid of the most basic amenities - electricity, transport and medicine. The few survivors of the human race are forced to fall back on the most primitive skills in order to live and re-establish some semblance of law and order.Abby Grant, widowed by the plague, moves through this new dark age with determination, sustained by hope that her son, who fled his boarding school at the onset, has survived. She knows she must relearn the skills on which civilisation was built. With others, she founds a commune and the group return to the soil. But marauding bands threaten their existence. For Abby, there's a chance for a new life and love when she encounters James Garland, the fourteenth Earl of Woodhouse, who is engaged in a desperate fight to save his ancestral home. But more important, she must find her son.By Terry Nation. 1976
Survivors of a global plague battle for life on an empty planet. A gripping vision of a post-apocalyptic world...'A fine…
piece of British post-apocalyptic fiction' 'Nation's novel is based on his original cult series...and is all the better for it, being far, far more gritty and realistic' SUNDAY SUNA virus has wiped out 95 per cent of the world's population in just a few weeks, leaving the remaining 5 per cent to stay alive in a world devoid of the most basic amenities - electricity, transport and medicine. The few survivors of the human race are forced to fall back on the most primitive skills in order to live and re-establish some semblance of law and order.Abby Grant, widowed by the plague, moves through this new dark age with determination, sustained by hope that her son, who fled his boarding school at the onset, has survived. She knows she must relearn the skills on which civilisation was built. With others, she founds a commune and the group return to the soil. But marauding bands threaten their existence. For Abby, there's a chance for a new life and love when she encounters James Garland, the fourteenth Earl of Woodhouse, who is engaged in a desperate fight to save his ancestral home. But more important, she must find her son.By Georgi Gospodinov. 2022
A GUARDIAN AND FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR'The most exquisite kind of literature... I've put it on a special…
shelf in my library that I reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then. 'OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead'Could not be more timely... It's funny and absurd, but it's also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to home... A writer of great warmth as well as skill'GUARDIAN'In equal measure playful and profound, Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it'CLAIRE MESSUD, author of The Woman Upstairs 'A genrebusting novel of ideas... Gospodinov's vision of tomorrow is the nightmare from which Europe knows it must awake. And accident, in combination with the book's own merits, may just have created a classic'THE TIMES 'Gospodinov is one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book'DAVE EGGERS, author of The Circle'Touching and intelligent'NEW YORK TIMES'A powerful and brilliant novel: clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic'SANDRO VERONESI, author of The Hummingbird'An immensely enjoyable book which achieves depth with an affable narrative voice'IRISH TIMES In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a 'clinic for the past' that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. As Gaustine's assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a 'time shelter', hoping to escape from the horrors of our present - a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov's reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, a major voice in international literature. Georgi Gospodinov is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers. Originally from Bulgaria, his novels have won his country's most prestigious literary prize twice and have been shortlisted for more than a dozen international prizes - including the 2015 PEN Literary Award for Translation, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Bruecke Berlin Preis, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Literaturpreis. He has won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo, among others.