Taking the train to nature in Chicagoland

Beyond the steel and asphalt await natural spaces that are easy to access and balm for the soul. Lindsay Welbers’s guide tells readers how to use Chicagoland’s extensive public rail system to reach forests, prairies, wetlands, dunes, and Lake Michigan. Designed to take up minimal space in a backpack, Chicago Transit Hikes provides train-to-trailhead information for thirty nature treks with features that include:

• Chapters with hikes organized by each rail line on the Metra, the South Shore train, and the CTA;
• Information on everything from accessibility to dog-friendliness to flora and fauna;
• Detailed descriptions of every destination;
• Practical tips on packing lists and itineraries.

Up-to-date and user-friendly, Chicago Transit Hikes connects Chicagoans and visitors alike with excursions for every season and level of difficulty.

Winner, Roland H. Bainton Book Prize, The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, 2019

Some sixty years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, a group of Nahua intellectuals in Mexico City set about compiling an extensive book of miscellanea, which was recorded in pictorial form with alphabetic texts in Nahuatl clarifying some imagery or adding new information altogether. This manuscript, known as the Codex Mexicanus, includes records pertaining to the Aztec and Christian calendars, European medical astrology, a genealogy of the Tenochca royal house, and an annals history of pre-conquest Tenochtitlan and early colonial Mexico City, among other topics. Though filled with intriguing information, the Mexicanus has long defied a comprehensive scholarly analysis, surely due to its disparate contents.

In this pathfinding volume, Lori Boornazian Diel presents the first thorough study of the entire Codex Mexicanus that considers its varied contents in a holistic manner. She provides an authoritative reading of the Mexicanus’s contents and explains what its creation and use reveal about native reactions to and negotiations of colonial rule in Mexico City. Diel makes sense of the codex by revealing how its miscellaneous contents find counterparts in Spanish books called Reportorios de los tiempos. Based on the medieval almanac tradition, Reportorios contain vast assortments of information related to the issue of time, as does the Mexicanus. Diel masterfully demonstrates that, just as Reportorios were used as guides to living in early modern Spain, likewise the Codex Mexicanus provided its Nahua audience a guide to living in colonial New Spain.

In a cure-focused profession, the death of a patient can often feel like a failure. Yet, every patient will inevitably transition from health to illness, independence to dependence, and life to death. These transitions often mark some of the most meaningful interactions between patients and care providers. Coping with Loss is a self-directed workbook that provides addresses common questions, concerns, and emotional responses to these interactions with dying patients. Each lesson opens with real stories of professional grief that will resonate with healthcare professionals at multiple stages of their careers. Critical topics covered include recognizing the diverse presentations of grief, identifying dying patients, decompressing individually, and debriefing as a team. Significant portions of the text discuss how challenging patient cases impact the formation of professional identity.  Ultimately, this workbook provides a place for healthcare providers to reflect on their patient interactions and learn how to support themselves and their healthcare teams through grief.