Over the last thirty years, we have seen an increase in rates of cancer, neurodegenerative disease, reproductive disorders, and diabetes, particularly in developed countries. At the same time, since the end of World War II approximately 100,000 synthetic chemical molecules have invaded our environment--and our food chain. In Our Daily Poison, award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin investigates the links between these two concerning trends, revealing how corporate interests and our ignorance about these invisible poisons may be costing us our lives. The result of a rigorous two-year-long investigation that took Robin across three continents (North America, Europe, and Asia), Our Daily Poison documents the many ways in which we encounter a shocking array of chemicals in our everyday lives--from the pesticides that blanket our crops to the additives and plastics that contaminate our food--and their effects on our bodies over time. Gathering as evidence scientific studies, testimonies of international regulatory agencies, and interviews with farm workers suffering from acute chronic poisoning, Robin makes a compelling case for outrage and action.
Palaces of Reason traces the fascinating history of three royal residences built outside of Naples in the eighteenth century at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta. Commissioned by King Charles of Bourbon and Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, who reigned over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, these buildings were far more than residences for the monarchs. They were designed to help reshape the economic and cultural fortunes of the realm. The palaces at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta are among the most complex architectural commissions of the eighteenth century. Considering the architecture and decoration of these complexes within their political, cultural, and economic contexts, Robin L. Thomas argues that Enlightenment ideas spurred their construction and influenced their decoration. These modes of thinking saw the palaces as more than just centers of royal pleasure or muscular assertions of the crown’s power. Indeed, writers and royal ministers viewed them as active agents in improving the cultural, political, social, and economic health of the kingdom. By casting the palaces within this narrative, Thomas counters the assumption that they were imitations of Versailles and the swan songs of absolutism, while expanding our understanding of the eighteenth-century European palace more broadly. Original and convincing, Thomas’s book will be of interest to historians of art and architectural history and eighteenth-century studies.
Drawing on the conquistador's own reports and on other sixteenth-century documents, both in English translation and the original Spanish, Varnum's lively narrative braids eyewitness testimony of events with historical interpretation benefiting from recent scholarship and archaeological investigation.
Explores the ritual concessions as acts of warfare, performances of submission, demonstrations of power, and representations of shifting, unstable worlds. The author considers the limits of sovereignty at conflict's end, showing how the ways we concede loss can be as important as the ways we claim victory.
Blake, an author living in London, explains that the impetus for this biography of the great Dutch painter came from his own connection in childhood to a painting purchased by his grandmother
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought-successfully-to feed upon this commerce and-with markedly less success-to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.
The astonishing variety and beauty of mathematical elements in stamp design is brought to life in this collection of more than 350 stamps, illustrated with mathematical figures, people, and content, each reproduced in enlarged format, in full color. It's a perfect gift book for anyone interested in stamps, or in the surprising use of mathematics in the real world. The author is widely known in the math community for his regular column on stamps in the magazine The Mathematical Intelligencer.
Winner of the 2000 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association Organizing Silence is a thought-provoking look at how silence is embedded in our language, society, and institutions. It provides an overview of the varied philosophical approaches to understanding the role of silence and communication. One particular view of silence/communication, as grounded in political and patriarchal frameworks, is given special attention. The author questions not only how dominant groups silence marginalized members of society, but also how marginalized groups privilege and abandon each other. Sexual harassment is given as an example of material and discursive practices that articulate both a micro and macro level of silence, and accounts of both women and men who have been sexually harassed are provided. The book provides an alternative aesthetic perspective as a way of understanding the realities we create, encouraging alternative ways to listen to the silence, and presenting novel possibilities for future research.
Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons is the biography of a writer who vividly depicted alien creatures and new worlds. As the author of the Dragonriders of Pern series, McCaffrey (1926–2011) was one of the most significant writers of science fiction and fantasy. She was the first woman to win the Hugo and Nebula awards, and her 1978 novel The White Dragon was the first science-fiction novel to appear on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list. This biography reveals a fascinating and complex figure, one who created and re-created her fiction by drawing on life experiences. At various stages, McCaffrey was a beautiful young girl who refused to fit into traditional gender roles in high school, a restless young mother who wanted to write, an American expatriate who became an Irish citizen, an animal lover who dreamed of fantasy worlds with perfect relationships between humans and beasts, and a wife trapped in an unhappy marriage just as the women's movement took hold. Author Robin Roberts conducted interviews with McCaffrey, her children, friends, and colleagues, and used archival correspondence and contemporary reviews and criticism. The biography examines how McCaffrey's early interests in theater, Slavonic languages and literature, and British history, mythology, and culture all shaped her science fiction. The book is a nuanced portrait of a writer whose appeal extends well beyond readers of her chosen genre.
In 1585, Luis Frois, a 53 year old Jesuit who spent all of his adult life in Japan listed 611(!) ways Europeans and Japanese were contrary (completely opposite) to one another. Robin D. Gill, a 53 year old writer who spent most of his adulthood in Japan, translates these topsy-turvy claims - we sniff the top of our melons to see if they are ripe / they sniff the bottom of theirs (10% of the book), examines their validity (20% of the book), and plays with them (70% of the book). Readers with the intellectual horsepower to enjoy ideas will be grateful for pages discussing things like the significance of black and white clothing or large eyes vs. small ones, while others with a ken to collect quirky facts will be delighted to find, say, that the women in Kyoto were known to urinate standing up, or Japanese horses had their stale gathered by long-handled ladles, etc., and serious students of history and comparative culture will gain a better understanding of the nature of radical difference (exotic, by definition) and its relationship with the farsighted policy of accommodation pioneered by Valignano in the Far East.
In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger and indigo craved by Europeans. By 1848 the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away either by independence movements, slave revolts, abolitionists or some combination of all three. How did this happen? Robin Blackburn’s history captures the complexity of a revolutionary age in a compelling narrative. In some cases colonial rule fell while slavery flourished, as happened in the South of the United States and in Brazil; elsewhere slavery ended but colonial rule remained, as in the British West Indies and French Windwards. But in French St. Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated. This story of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the “first emancipation” in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel actions of slave resistance and metropolitan abolitionism, and the contradictory implications of slaveholder patriotism. The dramatic events of this epoch are examined from an unexpected vantage point, showing how the torch of anti-slavery passed from the medieval communes to dissident Quakers, from African maroons to radical pirates, from Granville Sharp and Ottabah Cuguano to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from the black Jacobins to the Liberators of South America, and from the African Baptists in Jamaica to the Revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe and the Caribbean.
Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the danzón first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba. By the early twentieth-century, it had exploded in popularity throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African elements and had a strong influence on the development of later Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans. Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon. Co-authors Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore take an ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the processes of appropriation of the danzón in new contexts, its changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical forms. Delving into its long history of controversial popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production, consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as specific local scenes, Madrid and Moore underscore the extent of cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and are thereby able to analyze the danzón, the dance scenes it has generated, and the various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in broader regional processes. Danzón is a significant addition to the literature on Latin American music, dance, and expressive culture; it is essential reading for scholars, students, and fans of this music alike.
Spilling over with all sorts of useful information for the traveler, "Eyewitness Travel Guide: France" paints a complete picture of the country. Readers will appreciate the hundreds of color photos of everything from ski towns to beaches to wine vineyards.
The chapters of this book have been divided into 16 color-coded regions that reflect the diversity of France. These are based on the country's historical regions that were often defined by their geography and landscape as much as by their influence and power. Each has developed its own special flavor; its own architecture, cuisine, customs, music, dress, dialect and even language. The pages of the Eyewitness Travel Guide will give a taste of these areas and show you what there is to see and do. Annually revised and updated with beautiful new full-color photos, illustrations, and maps, this guide includes information on local customs, currency, medical services, and transportation. Consistently chosen over the competition in national consumer market research. The best keeps getting better!
The size of the problem, can be assessed This book is an off-shoot of the computerized from the following. Of 50 children bom, 1 London Dysmorphology Database which is now widely used by many geneticists and will have an easily detectable major malfor mation. Many of these will have a single dysmorphologists. Both the database and this malformation, but in the region of 8 in 1000 book have arisen out of a need to cope with the ever increasing nurober of multiple will have multiple abnormalities. This group will include 50% with chromosomal disorders congenital anomaly syndromes, especially recognizable by performing a karyotype, the details about their features and where infor mation can be found in the Iiterature. Indeed rest needing tobe diagnosed by other means. there are more than 2000 non-chromosomal It is to the diagnosis of this latter group that this book is dedicated. multiple malformation syndromes to which access is essential. If computerized databases have solved THE DIAGNOSIS OF DYSMORPHIC some of the problems, why is there a need SYNDROMES for this book? There are many physicians who do not have a desk computer or do not History feel at ease in using one. In addition geneticists are doing more satellite clinics and Before identifying the specific dysmorphic in some circumstances it would be more features, at least a three generation family history needs to be taken. It is necessary to convenient to carry a book than a computer.
Enhanced by an audio CD of selected examples and pieces, a course in playing all major styles of piano covers a history of the instrument and offers progressive instruction in all areas of technique, including posture, fingering, pedalling, scales, and exercises.
Everyone has teased, nagged, betrayed, or lied to another person. Likewise, everyone has been the unfortunate object of such unpleasant behaviors. In this intriguing book, social psychologist Robin M. Kowalski examines the intricacies of six annoying interpersonal behaviors: complaining, teasing, breaches of propriety, worry and reassurance-seeking, lying, and betrayal. She considers the functions of these behaviors, the types of people who are inclined to do them, the consequences for victims and perpetrators, and the ways in which such behaviors might be curtailed.Complaining, Teasing, and Other Annoying Behaviors provides for the first time a multifaceted picture of common annoying behaviors. The book answers these questions and many others:• Why do people tease?• What are the consequences of annoying behaviors for the people involved?• Is there a positive side to irritating behaviors?• Are people more likely to lie to those close to them or to strangers?• Do excuses and apologies diminish the hurtful effect of unpleasant behaviors?• What is the relation of gender and culture to specific annoying acts?
Presents an engaging introduction to the international conversation about enhancing social and educational practice using participatory action research.
The literature of medieval knighthood is shown to have influenced exploration narratives from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith. Explorers from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith viewed their travels and discoveries in the light of attitudes they absorbed from the literature of medieval knighthood. Their own accounts, and contemporary narratives [reinforced by the interest of early printers], reveal this interplay, but historians of exploration on the one hand, and of chivalry on the other, have largely ignored this cultural connection. Jennifer Goodman convincingly develops the ideaof the chivalric romance as an imaginative literature of travel; she traces the publication of medieval chivalric texts alongside exploration narratives throughout the later middle ages and renaissance, and reveals parallel themesand preoccupations. She illustrates this with the histories of a sequence of explorers and their links with chivalry, from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith, and including Gadifer de la Salle and his expedition to the Canary Islands, Prince Henry the Navigator, Cortés, Hakluyt, and Sir Walter Raleigh. JENNIFER GOODMAN teaches at Texas A & M University.
Get a quick, expert overview of the many key facets of pediatric cancer genetics with this concise, practical resource by Dr. Nathaniel H. Robin and Meagan Farmer, MS, CGC, MBA. Ideal for pediatric oncologists and all providers who care for children, this easy-to-read reference addresses the remarkable potential of genetic testing as well as the complexities of choosing the correct test, understanding the results, and counseling the family. Features a wealth of information on pediatric cancer genetics, including the epidemiology and biology of cancer and the genetic evaluation process and role of genetic counselors. Highlights examples of syndromes that present in childhood and increase susceptibility to cancer. Discusses the genetic evaluation process in context of the multidisciplinary care of children with cancer. Considers the ethical and legal issues of genetic testing in children and provides illustrative case examples. Consolidates today’s available information and guidance in this timely area into one convenient resource.
This volume is devoted to the variety of relationships that defined France and ist citizens. Man's connection with God is explored, the travel raelation and the particular hierarchy that exists between a director and a dramatist, respectively. These themes are further addressed in the articles that follow on relationships of authority, Catholics and Protestants, books and Illustrations, literary genres, travel relations, aesthetics and ethics and family relationships.
The thirteenth-century poet Gonzalo de Berceo is the first named author of Old Spanish letters and the most prolific contributor to the emergence of the body of learned vernacular verse known as the mester de clerecía. In the Doorway of All Worlds focuses on the four hagiographies Berceo produced as a unified body of poetic expression and world-building. Robin M. Bower traces the poet’s intricate juxtaposition of contraries to shed light on a poetic world that will innovate a deceptively simple poetic vernacular and elevate its capacity to express nuance, power, and mystery. The book examines the entanglements that bind formal and lexical choices, the inscription of performance sites and audiences, and problematic source authority. It argues that Berceo’s elaboration of a poetic vernacular was wholly enmeshed in the immediate human, experiential world and the diverse cultural, religious, linguistic, and literary contexts that framed it. The book also highlights how Berceo invented a literary vernacular that befits the spoken idiom not only for the crafting of learned fictions, but for giving linguistic shape to the ineffable. In the Doorway of All Worlds ultimately reveals how Berceo freed the meanings trapped in relics, shrines, and the impenetrable texts from which he translated the saints to circulate in a new time.
The emergency medicine expertise you need to prepare for--and manage--any type of bioterrorist attack! Written by emergency room physicians for emergency room physicians, Toxico-terrorism covers every essential aspect of the emergency medical response to microbial, radiological, and chemical agents of terrorism. Turn to any page, and you'll find lifesaving clinical strategies for the management of patients who have been exposed to a biologic, chemical, or nuclear agent. Features A logical, building-block organization filled with key tables and synoptic boxes Important coverage of pre-hospital and EMS issues Insights into the means of transmission, the modes of dispersal, and how secondary infection and/or contamination can occur Overview of bioterror-specific signs and symptoms A section on emergency department preparedness that reviews critical topics such as nursing triage, hospital/facility security, pharmacy preparedness, and hospital staff issues Up-to-date information on labs, microscopy, and radiology Key diagnostic criteria for all agents Thorough coverage of treatment strategies for all agents discussed in the book Infection control modalities Survey of prophylaxis strategies Valuable section on public health considerations
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