Dancing skeletons

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James McManus

The author, a hard-living, happily married, middle-aged American, gets a three-day "executive checkup" at the Mayo Clinic and is thereby forced to confront his mortality. He has to survive his own cardiovascular system, inherited habits, and genetic handicaps long enough to see his small children into adulthood. But with so much at stake, and in spite of his terror of death, he may not have the willpower to follow the Mayo clinicians' advice. The book negotiates the political and medical forks in the labyrinth of our health care system and calls for sanity and enlightenment in the stem cell research wars. It's a portrait of the looming mortality of a privileged generation that can't believe the party's winding down, if not over.--From publisher description.

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Mike Samuels and Nancy Samuels

This manual is designed to be used by parents and children together to help ensure health from conception until age four. It includes medical advice on how to deal with common illnesses and accidents. It emphasizes the importance of balancing stress, nutrition, exercise when considering a child's health. The authors provide a guide on a child's body and how it works - written for children. This work goes on to explain how to analyze a home environment in order to protect and improve a child's health.

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Chikako Takeshita

The intrauterine device (IUD) is used by 150 million women around the world. It is the second most prevalent method of female fertility control in the global South and the third most prevalent in the global North. Over its five decades of use, the IUD has been viewed both as a means for women's reproductive autonomy and as coercive tool of state-imposed population control, as a convenient form of birth control on a par with the pill and as a threat to women's health. Takeshita investigates the development, marketing, and use of the IUD since the 1960s. She offers a biography of a multifaceted technological object through a feminist science studies lens, tracing the transformations of the scientific discourse around it over time and across different geographies. Takeshita describes how developers of the IUD adapted to different social interests in their research and how changing assumptions about race, class, and female sexuality often guided scientific inquiries. The IUD became a politically versatile technology, adaptable to both feminist and nonfeminist reproductive politics because of researchers attempts to maintain the device's suitability for women in both the developing and the developed world. Takeshita traces the evolution of scientists concerns, from contraceptive efficacy and product safety to the politics of abortion, and describes the most recent, hormone-releasing, menstruation-suppressing iteration of the IUD. Examining fifty years of IUD development and use, finds a microcosm of the global political economy of women's bodies, health, and sexuality in the history of this contraceptive device. From publisher description.

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Kristine Barnett

La madre de un niño autista que fue finalmente reconocido como un genio relata su rechazo del consejo convencional de expertos en desarrollo y comparte las estrategias que utilizó para aprovechar el potencial de su hijo. El hijo Jacob de Kristine Barnett tiene un CI más alto que el de Einstein, una memoria fotográfica, y se enseñó cálculo en dos semanas. A los nueve años comenzó a trabajar en una teoría original en astrofísica que los expertos creen que algún día podría ponerlo en la línea de un Premio Nobel, ya los doce años se convirtió en un investigador pagado en física cuántica. Pero la historia del viaje de Kristine con Jake es aún más notable porque su extraordinaria mente estaba casi perdida por el autismo. The mother of an autistic child who was eventually recognized as a genius recounts her rejection of conventional advice from developmental experts and shares the strategies she utilized for tapping her son's potential. Kristine Barnett's son Jacob has an IQ higher than Einstein's, a photographic memory, and he taught himself calculus in two weeks. At nine he started working on an original theory in astrophysics that experts believe may someday put him in line for a Nobel Prize, and at age twelve he became a paid researcher in quantum physics. But the story of Kristine's journey with Jake is all the more remarkable because his extraordinary mind was almost lost to autism.