BiblioVault - Books about Whispers

Listening to the Whispers

Re-thinking Ethics in Healthcare

Edited by Christine Sorrell Dinkins and Jeanne Merkle Sorrell

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Listening to the Whispers gives voice to scholars in philosophy, medical anthropology, physical therapy, and nursing, helping readers re-think ethics across the disciplines in the context of today's healthcare system. Diverse voices, often unheard, challenge readers to enlarge the circle of their ethical concerns and look for hidden pathways toward new understandings of ethics. Essays range from a focus on the context of corporatization and managed care environments to a call for questioning the fundamental values of society as these values silently affect many others in healthcare. Each chapter is followed by a brief essay that highlights issues useful for scholarly research and classroom discussion. The conversations of interpretive research in healthcare contained in this volume encourage readers to re-think ethics in ways that will help to create an ethical healthcare system with a future of new possibilities.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

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Whispers and Shadows

A Naturalist’s Memoir

Jerry Apps

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015

In these times of technological innovation and fast-paced electronic communication, we often take nature for granted—or even consider it a hindrance to our human endeavors. In Whispers and Shadows: A Naturalist’s Memoir, Jerry Apps explores such topics as the human need for wilderness, rediscovering a sense of wonder, and his father’s advice to “listen for the whispers” and “look in the shadows” to learn nature’s deepest lessons.

Combining his signature lively storytelling and careful observations of nature, Apps draws on a lifetime of experiences, from his earliest years growing up on a central Wisconsin farm to his current ventures as gardener, tree farmer, and steward of wetlands, prairies, and endangered Karner blue butterflies. He also takes inspiration from the writings of Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard, Henry David Thoreau, Sigurd Olson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, Richard Louv, and Rachel Carson. With these eloquent essays, Jerry Apps reminds us to slow down, turn off technology, and allow our senses to reconnect us to the natural world. For it is there, he writes, that “I am able to return to a feeling I had when I was a child, a feeling of having room to stretch my arms without interfering with another person, a feeling of being a small part of something much larger than I was, and I marvel at the idea.”

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Whispers In The Dark

Fiction Louisa May Alcott

Elizabeth Lennox Keyser

University of Tennessee Press, 1995

Whispers in the Pines

A Naturalist in the Northeast

Burger, Joanna

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In this book, naturalist Joanna Burger takes us on a series of delightful trips through the Pine Barrens. From the Albany Pine Bush, the Long Island Barrens, and the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the Northeast, to the pinelands of South Carolina and Florida, Burger describes in lively detail how these habitats have come to harbor such a unique assemblage of species.

She introduces us to amphibians and reptiles, neotropical migrants and other birds, and a range of common and unusual mammals. Burger also traces the regions’ historic and geologic backgrounds, and the impact of human occupation from the time of the paleo-Indians to the present. She revisits the tension between development and preservation, reminding us that a healthy pine barren region requires uninterrupted land and rejuvenating fires, both of which are increasingly jeopardized.

Whispers in the Pines is essential reading for everyone concerned with the history and preservation of these unique landscapes and their wildlife.

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Whispers of a Savage Sort

And Other Plays about the Deaf American Experience

Raymond Luczak

Gallaudet University Press, 2009

“Oh, why can’t the deaf community be more like a family?” is the plaint of a character in Raymond Luczak’s title play Whispers of a Savage Sort. It also goes far in characterizing the main thread that runs through his remarkable collection of work offered in this new volume. Whispers of a Savage Sort and Other Plays about the Deaf American Experience presents a progression of plays that depict Deaf people in situations well-known by the community’s members. Written to be signing-driven, these plays feature Deaf characters from the various strata of Deaf society. Each play centers on different yet equally familiar issues.

Snooty brings to life the difficulties of surviving the social pecking order in a deaf residential school. The main character’s only escape is a rich fantasy life in which he is in control. Doogle confronts its characters with the intrusion of technological communication devices parallel to the virtually forced intimacy of such a small, close community. Brought into stark focus by the specter of AIDS, Love in My Veins explores how trust, betrayal, and ultimately forgiveness can transform a Deaf couple’s love for each other in a Deaf community. The collection’s eponymous Whispers of a Savage Sort reveals the relentless damage that rumor and innuendo can do to a diverse group of Deaf individuals. The emotions, identities, and consequences created by Luczak in these dramas illuminate the Deaf American community in fascinating detail rarely seen in any medium today.

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Whispers of Cruel Wrongs

The Correspondence of Louisa Jacobs and Her Circle, 1879-1911

Edited by Mary Maillard

University of Wisconsin Press, 2020

Harriet Jacobs's famous autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, includes her heartbreaking account of parting with her young daughter, Louisa, who had been taken away to the North by her white father. Here, Mary Maillard follows the thread of the Jacobs family lineage by revealing the communications of Louisa Jacobs and her close friends in more than seventy previously unidentified letters. In this annotated correspondence, new voices call out from the lost world of nineteenth-century African American women who persevered despite difficult family obligations and the racial strife that marked the post-Reconstruction era.

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Whispers of the Ancients

Native Tales for Teaching and Healing in Our Time

Tamarack Song and Moses (Amik) Beaver

University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Whispers of the Ancients helps us reconnect with the spirit of story that is a part of all our heritages. With respect for the wisdom of the past and with an eye toward the cross-cultural links that legends can make between us, Tamarack Song offers a gathering of tales and insightful comments that point the way back to the circle."
---Joseph Bruchac, author of more than 70 books for children and adults, including (with coauthor Michael J. Caduto) the best-selling Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children

It's easy to imagine yourself transported back to a time when an Elder might have told stories like those in Whispers of the Ancients around a glowing hearth. Thanks to Tamarack Song's storytelling skills, monsters, heroes, and shapeshifters come alive and open a doorway to the mysteries of life. Easily accessible to all ages, this is a book that speaks to each person at his or her own level of comprehension and need. It is as beautiful to read as it is to look at.

Stunning Aboriginal artwork by Moses (Amik) Beaver combines with provocative storytelling to renew, in all their traditional splendor, exceptional legends from around the world. Entertaining, profound, passionate, glorious---these are stories that illustrate and evoke themes common to everyone's life, with an ancient wisdom that helps the listener to cope with today's opportunities for tenderness, grief, passion, and irony.

Easily accessible to all ages, this is a book that speaks to each person at his or her own level of comprehension and need. It's as beautiful to read as it is to look at.

Tamarack Song has sought out the stories of the North African and Central Asian tribal peoples from whom he is descended, and he has listened to the tales of indigenous people from the tundra to the tropics. His books include Journey to the Ancestral Self, and he has contributed to Lois Einhorn's Forgiveness and Child Abuse. He is also a counselor, wilderness skills teacher, rites-of-passage guide, and founder of the Teaching Drum Outdoor School. Song lives in the Nicolet National Forest near Three Lakes, Wisconsin.

Moses (Amik) Beaver is an Ojibwe artist from the isolated fly-in community of Nibinamik (Summer Beaver), Ontario, three hundred miles north of Lake Superior. Grants from the Ontario Arts Council and other sources support his ongoing work with youth, and partial support for this book's illustrations comes from the District School Board of Nibinamik.

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