Our Marvelous Bodies

Our Marvelous Bodies

Author: Gary F. Merrill

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2008-03-07

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 081354470X

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Our Marvelous Bodies offers a unique perspective on the structure, function, and care of the major systems of the human body. Unlike other texts that use a strictly scientific approach, physiologist Gary F. Merrill relays medical facts alongside personal stories that help students relate to and apply the information. Readers learn the basics of feedback control systems, homeostasis, and physiological gradients. These principles apply to an understanding of the body’s functioning under optimal, healthy conditions, and they provide insight into states of acute and chronic illness. Separate chapters are devoted to each of the body’s systems in detail: nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, renal, gastrointestinal, musculoskeletal, reproductive, and immune. Through a series of real-life examples, the book also shows the importance of maintaining careful medical records for health care professionals, scientists, and patients alike.


Marvelous Bodies

Marvelous Bodies

Author: Vetri Nathan

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2017-08-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1612494897

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Historically a source of emigrants to Northern Europe and the New World, Italy has rapidly become a preferred destination for immigrants from the global South. Life in the land of la dolce vita has not seemed so sweet recently, as Italy struggles with the cultural challenges caused by this surge in immigration. Marvelous Bodies by Vetri Nathan explores thirteen key full-length Italian films released between 1990 and 2010 that treat this remarkable moment of cultural role reversal through a plurality of styles. In it, Nathan argues that Italy sees itself as the quintessential internal Other of Western Europe, and that this subalternity directly influences its cinematic response to immigrants, Europe's external Others. In framing his case to understand Italy's cinematic response to immigrants, Nathan first explores some basic questions: Who exactly is the Other in Italy? Does Italy's own past partial alterity affect its present response to its newest subalterns? Drawing on Homi Bhabha's writings and Italian cinematic history, Nathan then posits the existence of marvelous bodies that are momentarily neither completely Italian nor completely immigrant. This ambivalence of forms extends to the films themselves, which tend to be generic hybrids. The persistent curious presence of marvelous bodies and a pervasive generic hybridity enact Italy's own chronic ambivalence that results from its presence at the cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean.


Our Intelligent Bodies

Our Intelligent Bodies

Author: Gary F. Merrill

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2021-01-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0813598532

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Human intelligence isn’t just located in the brain. Our bodies are marvelously sophisticated and complex, with a variety of autonomic systems that help maintain our health without us ever having to think about them. But how exactly do all these physiological structures actually work? In Our Intelligent Bodies, physiology professor Gary F. Merrill takes you on a guided tour through the human body. You’ll learn how our eyes are designed to detect unimaginably small bursts of light and how our ears contain bundles of tiny hairs, each one attuned to different sound frequencies. You’ll also discover how our hearts are smart enough to compensate for skipped beats and irregular rhythms and how our pulmonary system adjusts for low oxygen levels. You’ll even find out why the gut is sometimes called the “second brain,” its reflexes controlled by millions of neurons. Written in a fun, easy-to-comprehend style and filled with illuminating analogies, Our Intelligent Bodies also brings readers up to date on cutting-edge research into the wonders of human physiology. It will give you a new appreciation for the smart decisions our bodies are making when our brains aren’t paying attention.


Shelved

Shelved

Author: Sue Matthews Petrovski

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1612494994

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Sue Petrovski has always been capable, thoughtful, and productive. After retiring from a long and successful career in education, she published two books, ran an antiques business, and volunteered in her community. When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and until her death eight years later, Petrovski served as her primary caregiver. She even cared for her husband when he also succumbed to dementia. However, when Petrovski's husband fell ill with sepsis at the age of 82, it threw everything into question. Would he survive? And if so, would she be able to care for him and manage the family home where they had lived for 47 years? More importantly, how long would she be able to do so? After making the decision to sell their house and move into a senior living community, Petrovski found herself thrust into the corporate care model of elder services available in the United States. In Shelved: A Memoir of Aging in America, she reflects on the move and the benefits and deficits of American for-profit elder care. Petrovski draws on extensive research that demonstrates the cultural value of our elders and their potential for leading vital, creative lives, especially when given opportunities to do so, offering a cogent, well-informed critique of elder care options in this country. Shelved provides readers with a personal account of what it is like to leave a family home and enter a new world where everyone is old and where decisions like where to sit in the dining room fall to low-level corporate managers. Showcasing the benefits of communal living as well as the frustrations of having decisions about meals, public spaces, and governance driven by the bottom line, Petrovski delivers compelling suggestions for the transformation of an elder care system that more often than not condescends to older adults into one that puts people first—a change that would benefit us all, whether we are 40, 60, 80, or beyond.


The Body Incantatory

The Body Incantatory

Author: Paul Copp

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0231537786

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Whether chanted as devotional prayers, intoned against the dangers of the wilds, or invoked to heal the sick and bring ease to the dead, incantations were pervasive features of Buddhist practice in late medieval China (600–1000 C.E.). Material incantations, in forms such as spell-inscribed amulets and stone pillars, were also central to the spiritual lives of both monks and laypeople. In centering its analysis on the Chinese material culture of these deeply embodied forms of Buddhist ritual, The Body Incantatory reveals histories of practice—and logics of practice—that have until now remained hidden. Paul Copp examines inscribed stones, urns, and other objects unearthed from anonymous tombs; spells carved into pillars near mountain temples; and manuscripts and prints from both tombs and the Dunhuang cache. Focusing on two major Buddhist spells, or dhāraṇī, and their embodiment of the incantatory logics of adornment and unction, he makes breakthrough claims about the significance of Buddhist incantation practice not only in medieval China but also in Central Asia and India. Copp's work vividly captures the diversity of Buddhist practice among medieval monks, ritual healers, and other individuals lost to history, offering a corrective to accounts that have overemphasized elite, canonical materials.


Modern Bodies

Modern Bodies

Author: Julia L. Foulkes

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-11-03

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0807862029

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In 1930, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham proclaimed the arrival of "dance as an art of and from America." Dancers such as Doris Humphrey, Ted Shawn, Katherine Dunham, and Helen Tamiris joined Graham in creating a new form of dance, and, like other modernists, they experimented with and argued over their aesthetic innovations, to which they assigned great meaning. Their innovations, however, went beyond aesthetics. While modern dancers devised new ways of moving bodies in accordance with many modernist principles, their artistry was indelibly shaped by their place in society. Modern dance was distinct from other artistic genres in terms of the people it attracted: white women (many of whom were Jewish), gay men, and African American men and women. Women held leading roles in the development of modern dance on stage and off; gay men recast the effeminacy often associated with dance into a hardened, heroic, American athleticism; and African Americans contributed elements of social, African, and Caribbean dance, even as their undervalued role defined the limits of modern dancers' communal visions. Through their art, modern dancers challenged conventional roles and images of gender, sexuality, race, class, and regionalism with a view of American democracy that was confrontational and participatory, authorial and populist. Modern Bodies exposes the social dynamics that shaped American modernism and moved modern dance to the edges of society, a place both provocative and perilous.


The Marvellous Adventure of Being Human

The Marvellous Adventure of Being Human

Author: Max Pemberton

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2019-08-22

Total Pages: 66

ISBN-13: 1526361205

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Join Doctor Max Pemberton as he takes you on a marvellous adventure around the human body! Shrink yourself down as small as you can go. No - much smaller than that! You'll need to be small enough to crawl up nostrils, peer inside eyeballs and float through the bloodstream, because we're about to embark on an amazing trip through your awesome anatomy. On our travels we'll discover startling facts about how our bodies work and why they're so extraordinarily special. And that's not all - Dr Max will be on hand to help you feel your best with his expert body boosting tips on living and eating well. So grab your magnifying glass and stethoscope, and let's set off on our marvellous adventure of being human!


John Trevisa's Information Age

John Trevisa's Information Age

Author: Emily Steiner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 0192896903

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What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades. This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.


NIV, Hope in the Mourning Bible

NIV, Hope in the Mourning Bible

Author: Zondervan,

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 1537

ISBN-13: 0310429455

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WHEN A CASSEROLE OR A GREETING CARD ISN’T ENOUGH. Grief is one of life’s toughest challenges. During such times it is difficult to know where to turn. Yet in the midst of your deepest despair, God reveals Himself and His promises for a better tomorrow. The NIV Hope in the Mourning Bible works to bring a peaceful sense—in the midst of the coldest winter—that spring will one day come again. The collection of devotions and prayers warmly offer inspiration and hope based in God’s Word and his promises to those who have lost loved ones. This Bible emphasizes the love and hope that your Lord has for you even during your darkest days. Features • Complete text of the NIV, the world’s most popular modern-English Bible • Daily devotions written for and by those who have experienced the loss of a loved one or who are helping a loved one through extended terminal illness • A prayer appendix featuring 52 prayers based on the book of Psalms • Short reflections and song lyrics for meditation • Resources list containing information for those seeking additional help


The Body's Question

The Body's Question

Author: Tracy K. Smith

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 1555978657

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The debut collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States * Winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize * You are pure appetite. I am pure Appetite. You are a phantom In that far-off city where daylight Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone. --from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y" The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."