BiblioVault - Books about Popular works

Heal Your Heart

How You Can Prevent or Reverse Heart Disease

Gould, K. Lance

Rutgers University Press, 2000

In Heal Your Heart, Dr. K. Lance Gould’s goals are better survival and improved health through the prevention and reversal of heart and vascular disease. His program provides practical, do-it-yourself steps and explores options beyond traditional invasive medical procedures for more definitive solutions. Designed for the general reader, Heal Your Heart can be used by anyone. Scientific information and practical guidelines are presented in simple, full-color illustrations, summary graphs or tables with brief, nontechnical text that incorporate the most recent medical knowledge. Dr. Gould introduces readers to new non-invasive medical imaging technologies such as cardiac PET that may potentially provide early diagnoses for people who may be at risk. Dr. Gould demonstrates how patients and physicians can work together to conquer one of the relentless causes of disability and death. He outlines what questions to ask medical staff and how to manage your own reversal program including your doctors, whether specialists or general practitioners. The principles of reversing cardiovascular disease in this program may be adapted to various lifestyles, habits, tastes, time constraints, and personalities. Dr. Gould’s program avoids multiple medical consultations and special facilities or equipment. The essentials are healthy living habits combined with medical management at home and work. This reversal program may replace surgical or catheter procedures for treating cardiovascular disease in most patients. In some specific cases, some people may also need balloon dilation or bypass surgery. Dr. Gould furnishes the criteria used to identify the minority of patients who need them. For this minority, Dr. Gould’s reversal program in addition to surgical treatment will provide optimal outcome by dramatically lowering further risk. For most people, this program produces a sense of well-being and reduces or eliminates symptoms.

[more]

The Hoarders

Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

Scott Herring

University of Chicago Press, 2014

The verb “declutter” has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, but its ever-increasing usage suggests that it’s only a matter of time. Articles containing tips and tricks on how to get organized cover magazine pages and pop up in TV programs and commercials, while clutter professionals and specialists referred to as “clutterologists” are just a phone call away. Everywhere the sentiment is the same: clutter is bad.

In The Hoarders, Scott Herring provides an in-depth examination of how modern hoarders came into being, from their onset in the late 1930s to the present day. He finds that both the idea of organization and the role of the clutterologist are deeply ingrained in our culture, and that there is a fine line between clutter and deviance in America. Herring introduces us to Jill, whose countertops are piled high with decaying food and whose cabinets are overrun with purchases, while the fly strips hanging from her ceiling are arguably more fly than strip. When Jill spots a decomposing pumpkin about to be jettisoned, she stops, seeing in the rotting, squalid vegetable a special treasure. “I’ve never seen one quite like this before,” she says, and looks to see if any seeds remain. It is from moments like these that Herring builds his questions: What counts as an acceptable material life—and who decides? Is hoarding some sort of inherent deviation of the mind, or a recent historical phenomenon grounded in changing material cultures? Herring opts for the latter, explaining that hoarders attract attention not because they are mentally ill but because they challenge normal modes of material relations. Piled high with detailed and, at times, disturbing descriptions of uncleanliness, The Hoarders delivers a sweeping and fascinating history of hoarding that will cause us all to reconsider how we view these accumulators of clutter.

[more]

How to Grow a Human

Adventures in How We Are Made and Who We Are

Philip Ball

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Two summers ago, scientists removed a tiny piece of flesh from Philip Ball’s arm and turned it into a rudimentary “mini-brain.” The skin cells, removed from his body, did not die but were instead transformed into nerve cells that independently arranged themselves into a dense network and communicated with each other, exchanging the raw signals of thought. This was life—but whose?

In his most mind-bending book yet, Ball makes that disconcerting question the focus of a tour through what scientists can now do in cell biology and tissue culture. He shows how these technologies could lead to tailor-made replacement organs for when ours fail, to new medical advances for repairing damage and assisting conception, and to new ways of “growing a human.” For example, it might prove possible to turn skin cells not into neurons but into eggs and sperm, or even to turn oneself into the constituent cells of embryos. Such methods would also create new options for gene editing, with all the attendant moral dilemmas. Ball argues that such advances can therefore never be about “just the science,” because they come already surrounded by a host of social narratives, preconceptions, and prejudices. But beyond even that, these developments raise questions about identity and self, birth and death, and force us to ask how mutable the human body really is—and what forms it might take in years to come.

[more]

How We See the Sky

A Naked-Eye Tour of Day and Night

Thomas Hockey

University of Chicago Press, 2002

Gazing up at the heavens from our backyards or a nearby field, most of us see an undifferentiated mess of stars—if, that is, we can see anything at all through the glow of light pollution. Today’s casual observer knows far less about the sky than did our ancestors, who depended on the sun and the moon to tell them the time and on the stars to guide them through the seas. Nowadays, we don’t need the sky, which is good, because we’ve made it far less accessible, hiding it behind the skyscrapers and the excessive artificial light of our cities.

How We See the Sky gives us back our knowledge of the sky, offering a fascinating overview of what can be seen there without the aid of a telescope. Thomas Hockey begins by scanning the horizon, explaining how the visible universe rotates through this horizon as night turns to day and season to season. Subsequent chapters explore the sun’s and moon’s respective motions through the celestial globe, as well as the appearance of solstices, eclipses, and planets, and how these are accounted for in different kinds of calendars. In every chapter, Hockey introduces the common vocabulary of today’s astronomers, uses examples past and present to explain them, and provides conceptual tools to help newcomers understand the topics he discusses.

Packed with illustrations and enlivened by historical anecdotes and literary references, How We See the Sky reacquaints us with the wonders to be found in our own backyards.

[more]