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My Family and Other Seedlings: A Year on a Dorset Allotment
By Lalage Snow. 2024
A few years ago Lally Snow moved to a Dorset village with her husband and three small children, having spent…
over a decade as a war photographer, foreign correspondent and film maker living in Kabul. She covered the conflict there as well as other wars from Gaza to Eastern Ukraine, and Iraq.In the late winter of 2021-22, Lally decided to rent an allotment, despite having only a rudimentary knowledge of gardening. She was starting from scratch and setting herself the dual challenge of growing an allotment at the same time as growing a family.This is a heart-warming, wry and at times tearful account of Lally's travails as a mother and novice allotment holder, counterpointing horticultural progress with the perils of parenting. Along the way she reflects on the drudgery of English rural domesticity after a professional life chasing war and adventure, the history of the allotment since Saxon times, and the wonderful moment when gardening becomes fun rather than just feeding a family.My Family and Other Seedlings: A Year on a Dorset Allotment
By Lalage Snow. 2024
A few years ago Lally Snow moved to a Dorset village with her husband and three small children, having spent…
over a decade as a war photographer, foreign correspondent and film maker living in Kabul. She covered the conflict there as well as other wars from Gaza to Eastern Ukraine, and Iraq.In the late winter of 2021-22, Lally decided to rent an allotment, despite having only a rudimentary knowledge of gardening. She was starting from scratch and setting herself the dual challenge of growing an allotment at the same time as growing a family.This is a heart-warming, wry and at times tearful account of Lally's travails as a mother and novice allotment holder, counterpointing horticultural progress with the perils of parenting. Along the way she reflects on the drudgery of English rural domesticity after a professional life chasing war and adventure, the history of the allotment since Saxon times, and the wonderful moment when gardening becomes fun rather than just feeding a family.My Family and Other Seedlings: A Year on a Dorset Allotment
By Lalage Snow. 2024
A few years ago Lally Snow moved to a Dorset village with her husband and three small children, having spent…
over a decade as a war photographer, foreign correspondent and film maker living in Kabul. She covered the conflict there as well as other wars from Gaza to Eastern Ukraine, and Iraq.In the late winter of 2021-22, Lally decided to rent an allotment, despite having only a rudimentary knowledge of gardening. She was starting from scratch and setting herself the dual challenge of growing an allotment at the same time as growing a family.This is a heart-warming, wry and at times tearful account of Lally's travails as a mother and novice allotment holder, counterpointing horticultural progress with the perils of parenting. Along the way she reflects on the drudgery of English rural domesticity after a professional life chasing war and adventure, the history of the allotment since Saxon times, and the wonderful moment when gardening becomes fun rather than just feeding a family.Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Among Endangered Birds
By Sophie A. Osborn. 2024
The story of one woman’s remarkable work with a trio of charismatic, endangered bird species—and her discoveries about the devastating…
threats that imperil them. In Feather Trails, wildlife biologist and birder Sophie A. H. Osborn reveals how the harmful environmental choices we’ve made—including pesticide use, the introduction of invasive species, lead poisoning, and habitat destruction—have decimated Peregrine Falcons, Hawaiian Crows, and California Condors. In the Rocky Mountains, the cloud forests of Hawai’i, and the Grand Canyon, Sophie and her colleagues work day-to-day to try to reintroduce these birds to the wild, even when it seems that the odds are steeply stacked against their survival. With humor and suspense, Feather Trails introduces us to the fascinating behaviors and unique personalities of Sophie’s avian charges and shows that what endangers them ultimately threatens all life on our planet. More than a deeply researched environmental investigation, Feather Trails is also a personal journey and human story, in which Sophie overcomes her own obstacles—among them heat exhaustion, poachers, rattlesnakes, and chauvinism. Ultimately, Feather Trails is an inspiring, poignant narrative about endangered birds and how our choices can help to ensure a future not only for the rarest species, but for us too. "An intimate look at the wonder and effort needed for working with endangered species in the wild. [Osborn's] matter-of-fact writing style and wry humor make the reader part of the action."—Booklist (starred review)Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine
By Damon Tweedy. 2024
From the New York Times bestselling author of Black Man in a White Coat comes a powerful and urgent call…
to center psychiatry and mental health care into the mainstream of medicineAs much as we all might wish that mental health problems, with their elusive causes and unsettling behaviors, simply did not exist, millions of people suffer from them, sometimes to an extreme extent. Many others face addiction to alcohol and other drugs, as overdose and suicide deaths abound. Yet the vast majority of doctors receive minimal instruction in treating these conditions during their lengthy medical training. This mismatch ignores the clear overlap between physical and mental distress, and too-often puts psychiatrists on the outside looking in as the medical system continues to fail many patients. In Facing The Unseen, bestselling author, professor of psychiatry, and practicing physician Damon Tweedy guides us through his days working in outpatient clinics, emergency rooms, and hospitals as he meets people from all walks of life who are grappling with physical and psychological illnesses. In powerful, compassionate, and eloquent prose, Tweedy argues for a more comprehensive and integrated approach where people with mental illness have a health care system that places their full well-being front and center.Kid-ventors: 35 Real Kids and their Amazing Inventions
By Kailei Pew. 2024
What do swim fins, Popsicles®, Infection-Detecting Stitches, the Braille alphabet, and Taco vs. Burrito all have in common? They were…
all invented by kids! When Remya Jose had to spend many hours washing her family’s laundry by hand, she invented a pedal powered washing machine that could finish the chore in only 20 minutes! When Tripp Phillips’ Lego creations kept falling apart, he developed a glue strong enough to hold his creations together that would wash off when he was ready to build something new! And when Fatima Al Kaabi didn’t have anyone willing to teach her about robotics, she turned to the internet to teach herself all the skills she needed—and created multiple crowd-pleasing robots in the process! From Popsicles® and swim fins to robots and glitter shooting prosthetics, Kailei Pew's middle grade nonfiction debut is full of fun and inspiring stories, illustrated by Shannon Wright, about real kid inventors who proved that even the youngest people can change the world.The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
By Siri Hustvedt. 2009
In this unique neurological memoir Siri Hustvedt attempts to solve her own mysterious conditionWhile speaking at a memorial event for…
her father in 2006, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Despite her flapping arms and shaking legs, she continued to speak clearly and was able to finish her speech. It was as if she had suddenly become two people: a calm orator and a shuddering wreck. Then the seizures happened again and again. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves tracks Hustvedt's search for a diagnosis, one that takes her inside the thought processes of several scientific disciplines, each one of which offers a distinct perspective on her paroxysms but no ready solution. In the process, she finds herself entangled in fundamental questions: What is the relationship between brain and mind? How do we remember? What is the self? During her investigations, Hustvedt joins a discussion group in which neurologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and brain scientists trade ideas to develop a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. She volunteers as a writing teacher for psychiatric in-patients at the Payne Whitney clinic in New York City and unearths precedents in medical history that illuminate the origins of and shifts in our theories about the mind-body problem. In The Shaking Woman, Hustvedt synthesizes her experience and research into a compelling mystery: Who is the shaking woman? In the end, the story she tells becomes, in the words of George Makari, author of Revolution in Mind, "a brilliant illumination for us all."I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art
By Emily C. Bloom. 2024
An eloquent and intimate debut memoir about navigating the gap between expectation and reality in modern motherhood.I Cannot Control Everything…
Forever is Emily Bloom’s journey towards and through motherhood, a path that has become, for the average woman, laden with data and medical technology. Emily faces decisions regarding genetic testing and diagnosis, technologies that offer the illusion of certainty but carry the weight of hard decisions. Her desire to know more thrusts her back into the history of science, as she traces the discoveries that impacted the modern state of pregnancy and motherhood. With the birth of their daughter, who is diagnosed with congenital deafness and later, Type 1 diabetes, Emily and her husband find their life centered around medical data, devices, and doctor’s visits, but also made richer and fuller by parenting an exceptional child. As Emily learns, technology and data do not reduce the labor of caretaking. These things often fall, as the pandemic starkly revealed, on mothers. Trying to find a way out of the loneliness and individualism of 21st century parenthood, Emily finds joy in reaching outwards, towards art and literature–such as the maternal messiness of Louise Bourgeois or Greek myths about the power of fate–as well as the collective sustenance of friends and community.With lyrical and enchanting prose, I Cannot Control Everything Forever is an inspired meditation on art, science, and motherhood.Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir
By Darius Stewart. 2024
From an exhilarating new voice, a breathtaking memoir about gay desire, Blackness, and growing up. Darius Stewart spent his childhood…
in the Lonsdale projects of Knoxville, where he grew up navigating school, friendship, and hisGregg Herken's Brotherhood of the Bomb is the fascinating story of the men who founded the nuclear age, fully told…
for the first timeThe story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller-the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction.How did science-and its practitioners-enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War? The story of these three men, builders of the bombs, is fundamentally about loyalty-to country, to science, and to each other-and about the wrenching choices that had to be made when these allegiances came into conflict.Gregg Herken gives us the behind-the-scenes account based upon a decade of research, interviews, and newly released Freedom of Information Act and Russian documents. Brotherhood of the Bomb is a vital slice of American history told authoritatively-and grippingly-for the first time.Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System
By Ivars Peterson. 1993
With his critically acclaimed best-sellers The Mathematical Toursist and Islands of Truth, Ivars Peterson took readers to the frontiers of…
modern mathematics. His new book provides an up-to-date look at one of science's greatest detective stories: the search for order in the workings of the solar system.In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton provided what astronomers had long sought: a seemingly reliable way of calculating planetary orbits and positions. Newton's laws of motion and his coherent, mathematical view of the universe dominated scientific discourse for centuries. At the same time, observers recorded subtle, unexpected movements of the planets and other bodies, suggesting that the solar system is not as placid and predictable as its venerable clockwork image suggests.Today, scientists can go beyond the hand calculations, mathematical tables, and massive observational logs that limited the explorations of Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and others. Using supercomputers to simulate the dynamics of the solar system, modern astronomers are learning more about the motions they observe and uncovering some astonishing examples of chaotic behavior in the heavens. Nonetheless, the long-term stability of the solar system remains a perplexing, unsolved issue, with each step toward its resolution exposing additional uncertainties and deeper mysteries.To show how our view of the solar system has changed from clocklike precision to chaos and complexity, Newton's Clock describes the development of celestial mechanics through the ages--from the star charts of ancient navigators to the seminal discoveries of the 17th centure; from the crucial work of Poincaré to the startling, sometimes controversial findings and theories made possible by modern mathematics and computer simulations. The result makes for entertaining and provocative reading, equal parts science, history, and intellectual adventure.Rust Belt Arcana: Tarot and Natural History in the Exurban Wilds
By Matt Stansberry, David Wilson. 2018
An insightful take on the Tarot through the lens of the industrial Midwest, and a beautiful piece of nature writing…
in its own right. What can the Tarot tell us about the flora and fauna of the industrial Midwest? In what ways might this ancient practice connect us to the Rust Belt today? Rust Belt Arcana uses the Tarot’s time-tested structure to answer these questions, juxtaposing the characteristics of the cards with the creatures and plants that surround us every day. The 22 idiosyncratic essays here—one for every card in the Major Arcana—bridge biology, natural history, and the human condition. They tell stories of abundance and loss, and they remind us of the Rust Belt’s persistent remnant wilderness, a landscape often dismissed as unremarkable. A magical book both for Tarot enthusiasts and for those who are seeking to see beauty in a beleaguered landscape and define their remarkable place within it.In This Together: My Story
By Ann Romney. 2015
When Mitt and Ann Romney met in their late teens, a great American love story began. And their life together…
would be blessed: five healthy sons, financial security, and a home filled with joy. Despite the typical ups and downs, they had a storybook life.Then, in 1998, Ann was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She couldn't believe it was real; there were no therapies or treatments to help her. Mitt told her that day that they would tackle the diagnosis as a team: They were in it together. "As long as it isn't fatal, we're fine. If you have to be in a wheelchair, I'll be right there to push it," he told her. And Ann thought, "But I'll be the one in the wheelchair." A caregiver and helper her whole life, she'd crossed a terrible invisible line. She wouldn't be able to care for her family anymore. She was the patient. Ann and Mitt would face the most frightening and humbling experience of their lives.From reflections on her early life, her marriage, and her diagnosis and recovery, the sources of her faith, and the stories of others who overcame adversity and inspired her to keep going, In This Together is a brave and deeply honest portrait of a family facing an unexpected blow, often in the most public of circumstances."A lot of people talk about a transformation that happens when life throws you a curve ball, and the big one in my life was my MS diagnosis. With all the blessings I've had, MS has been my greatest teacher: It has taught me about faith, compassion, and serving others. I've met many people along the way who've shared advice and demonstrated enormous resilience in the face of challenges; their stories gave me strength. In sharing my story, I want to give others hope as I've been given hope on this journey."The Chick and the Dead: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors
By Carla Valentine. 2017
Carla Valentine works with the dead. After studying forensics, she assisted pathologists with post-mortems for years before becoming the curator…
of the world’s most famous pathology museum. When it comes to death, she truly is an expert, and in this book she shares that expertise.Using the most common post-mortem process as the backbone of the narrative, The Chick and the Dead takes the reader through the process of an autopsy while also describing the history and changing cultures of our relationship with the dead. The book is full of vivid insight into what happens to our bodies in the end. Each chapter considers an aspect of an autopsy alongside an aspect of Carla’s own life and work and touches on some of the more controversial aspects of our feelings towards death, including the relationship between sex and death and our attitudes toward human tissue collection.Starting with the first cut, we move from external examination into the body itself, discovering more about the heart, stomach and brain, and into dismembered and reconstructed bodies, at each stage taking a colorful detour into the question of what these things can teach us about the living. Join Carla on the journey from microscope-requesting nine-year-old to pathology educator and death engager at a Victorian museum (a journey made via around 5,000 autopsies) as she tells the story of exactly what it’s like to live a life immersed in death.Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography, a True Story of Genius and Rivalry
By Roger Watson, Helen Rappaport. 2013
An intimate look at the journeys of two men—a gentleman scientist and a visionary artist—as they struggled to capture the…
world around them, and in the process invented modern photographyDuring the 1830s, in an atmosphere of intense scientific enquiry fostered by the industrial revolution, two quite different men—one in France, one in England—developed their own dramatically different photographic processes in total ignorance of each other's work. These two lone geniuses—Henry Fox Talbot in the seclusion of his English country estate at Lacock Abbey and Louis Daguerre in the heart of post-revolutionary Paris—through diligence, disappointment and sheer hard work overcame extraordinary odds to achieve the one thing man had for centuries been trying to do—to solve the ancient puzzle of how to capture the light and in so doing make nature 'paint its own portrait'. With the creation of their two radically different processes—the Daguerreotype and the Talbotype—these two giants of early photography changed the world and how we see it. Drawing on a wide range of original, contemporary sources and featuring plates in colour, sepia and black and white, many of them rare or previously unseen, Capturing the Light by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport charts an extraordinary tale of genius, rivalry and human resourcefulness in the quest to produce the world's first photograph.Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness
By Robert Aquinas McNally. 2024
John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States&’ vision of…
itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. That vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for millennia. Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not to the conquered Indigenous peoples who had once lived there. &“Somehow,&” he wrote, &“they seemed to have no right place in the landscape.&”Cast Out of Eden tells this neglected part of Muir&’s story—from Lowland Scotland and the Wisconsin frontier to the Sierra Nevada&’s granite heights and Alaska&’s glacial fjords—and his take on the tribal nations he encountered and embrace of an ethos that forced those tribes from their homelands. Although Muir questioned and worked against Euro-Americans&’ distrust of wild spaces and deep-seated desire to tame and exploit them, his view excluded Native Americans as fallen peoples who stained the wilderness&’s pristine sanctity. Fortunately, in a transformation that a resurrected and updated Muir might approve, this long-standing injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous nations and the federal government work together to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.Time Traveler: In Search of Dinosaurs and Other Fossils from Montana to Mongolia
By Michael Novacek. 2003
Hunting for fossils with a preeminent guide and teacherMichael Novacek, a world-renowned paleontologist who has discovered important fossils on virtually…
every continent, is an authority on patterns of evolution and on the relationships among extinct and extant organisms. Time Traveler is his captivating account of how his boyhood enthusiasm for dinosaurs became a lifelong commitment to vanguard science. He takes us with him as he discovers fossils in his own backyard in Los Angeles, then goes looking for them in the high Andes, the black volcanic mountains of Yemen, and the incredibly rich fossil badlands of the Gobi desert.Wherever Novacek goes he searches for still undiscovered evidence of what life was like on Earth millions of years ago. Along the way he has almost drowned, been stung by deadly scorpions, been held at gunpoint by a renegade army, and nearly choked in raging dust storms. Fieldwork is very demanding in a host of unusual, dramatic, sometimes hilarious ways, and Novacek writes of its alluring perils with affection and discernment. But Time Traveler also makes sense of many complex themes - about dinosaur evolution, continental drift, mass extinctions, new methods for understanding ancient environments, and the evolutionary secrets of DNA in fossil organisms. It is also an enthralling adventure story.Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder
By Alexander Kriss. 2024
An intimate, compassionate, and expansive portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder that rejects the conventional wisdom that the condition is untreatable…
and those diagnosed with it are &“difficult,&” told by a psychologist who specializes in BPDMental illness is heavily stigmatized within our society, and folks with BPD are portrayed as especially hopeless by doctors and popular culture alike. When, as a graduate student, Alexander Kriss first began working as a therapist in the field, his supervisors warned him that borderline patients were manipulative and had a tendency to drop out of treatment. Yet, years later, when Kriss was establishing his private practice and a patient named Ana came to his office, he felt compelled to try to help her, despite all of the warnings he'd heard.Borderline is the story of his work with Ana—how their relationship led Kriss to a deeper understanding of the borderline experience and what it means to be a person. Borderline is also the story of the disorder itself—Kriss traces accounts of the condition going back to antiquity, showing how this diagnosis has been known by many names over the millennia, most of them gendered: witchcraft, hysteria, moral insanity. All referred to a person—usually a woman—whose behavior and personality were seen as unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Kriss illustrates the pivotal role borderline patients played in the invention of psychotherapy, the development of modern psychology and psychiatry, and current attitudes about what it means to be healthy. Through the interweaving of personal and global histories, he ultimately argues that BPD is the most important diagnosis of our time: the individual expression of cultural angst that emerges out of systemic inequality, the fracturing of narratives, and our collective search for meaning and identity.A surprising, groundbreaking, and fiercely entertaining medical history that is both a collective narrative of women's bodies and a call…
to action for a new conversation around women's health. For as long as medicine has been a practice, women's bodies have been treated like objects to be practiced on: examined and ignored, idealized and sexualized, shamed, subjugated, mutilated, and dismissed. The history of women's healthcare is a story in which women themselves have too often been voiceless—a narrative instead written from the perspective of men who styled themselves as authorities on the female of the species, yet uninformed by women's own voices, thoughts, fears, pain and experiences. The result is a cultural and societal legacy that continues to shape the (mis)treatment and care of women. While the modern age has seen significant advancements in the medical field, the notion that female bodies are flawed inversions of the male ideal lingers on—as do the pervasive societal stigmas and lingering ignorance that shape women's health and relationships with their own bodies. Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist and medical historian Dr. Elizabeth Comen draws back the curtain on the collective medical history of women to reintroduce us to our whole bodies—how they work, the actual doctors and patients whose perspectives and experiences laid the foundation for today's medical thought, and the many oversights that still remain unaddressed. With a physician's knowledge and empathy, Dr. Comen follows the road map of the eleven organ systems to share unique and untold stories, drawing upon medical texts and journals, interviews with expert physicians, as well as her own experience treating thousands of women. Empowering women to better understand ourselves and advocate for care that prioritizes healthy and joyful lives— for us and generations to come—All in Her Head is written with humor, wisdom, and deep scientific and cultural insight. Eye-opening, sometimes enraging, yet always captivating, this shared memoir of women's medical history is an essential contribution to a holistic understanding and much-needed reclaiming of women's history and bodiesThe bodies keep coming: Dispatches from a black trauma surgeon on racism, violence, and how we heal
By Brian H Williams. 2023
Trauma surgeon Dr. Brian H. Williams has seen it all—gunshot wounds, stabbings, traumatic brain injuries—and ushers us into the trauma…
bay, where the wounds of a national emergency amass. As a Harvard-trained physician, he learned to keep his head down and his scalpel ready. As a Black man, he learned to swallow rage when patients told him to take out the trash. Just days after the tragic police shootings of two Black men, he tried to save the lives of officers shot in the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since 9/11. Thrust into the spotlight in a nation that loves feel-good stories more than hard truths, he came to rethink everything he thought he knew about medicine, injustice, and what true healing looks like. Now, in raw, intimate detail, he narrates not only the events of that night, but the grief and anger of a Black doctor on the front lines of trauma care. Working in the physician-writer tradition of Gawande and Tweedy, he diagnoses the roots of the violence that plagues us. He draws a through line between white supremacy, gun violence, and the bodies he tries to revive, training his surgeon's gaze on the structural ills manifesting themselves in his patients' bodies. What if racism is a feature of our healthcare system, not a bug? What if profiting from racial inequality is exactly what it's designed to do? Black and brown bodies will continue to be wracked by all types of violence, Williams argues, until we transform policy and law with compassion and care