Author: Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin
The development of a fully functional placenta was crucial to the evolution of human beings. It is the active interface of the most biologically intimate connection between two living organisms: a mother and her fetus. The Evolution of the Human Placenta discusses everything from the organs methods of protecting the fetus from the mothers own immune system to placental diseases. Starting with some of the earliest events that have constrained or influenced the path of placental evolution in mammals and progressing to the specifics of the human placenta, this book examines modern gestation within an evolutionary framework. Human beings, in terms of evolution, are a successful, rapidly multiplying species. Our reproductive physiology would appear to be functioning quite well. However, human gestation is fraught with many poor outcomes for both the mother and fetus that appear to beif not uniquefar more common in humans than in other mammals. High rates of early pregnancy loss, nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, preeclampsia and related maternal hypertension, and preterm birth are rare or absent in other mammals yet quite typical in humans. Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin explore more than 100 million years of evolution that led to the human placenta, and in so doing, they help unravel the mysteries of life's earliest moments.
Author: Edited by John C. Shields and Eric D. Lamore
The first African American to publish a book on any subject, poet Phillis Wheatley (1753?1784) has long been denigrated by literary critics who refused to believe that a black woman could produce such dense, intellectual work, let alone influence Romantic-period giants like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson once declared that the compositions published under her name are below dignity of criticism. In recent decades, however, Wheatleys work has come under new scrutiny as the literature of the eighteenth century and the impact of African American literature have been reconceived. In these never-before-published essays, fourteen prominent Wheatley scholars consider her work from a variety of angles, affirming her rise into the first rank of American writers. The pieces in the first section show that perhaps the most substantial measure of Wheatleys multilayered texts resides in her deft handling of classical materials. The contributors consider Wheatleys references to Virgils Aeneid and Georgics and to the feminine figure Dido as well as her subversive critique of white readers attracted to her adaptation of familiar classics. They also discuss Wheatleys use of the Homeric Trojan horse and eighteenth-century verse to mask her ambitions for freedom and her treatment of the classics as political tools. Engaging Wheatleys multilayered texts with innovative approaches, the essays in the second section recontextualize her rich manuscripts and demonstrate how her late-eighteenth-century works remain both current and timeless. They ponder Wheatleys verse within the framework of queer theory, the concepts of political theorist Hannah Arendt, rhetoric, African studies, eighteenth-century salon culture, and the theoretics of imagination. Together, these essays reveal the depth of Phillis Wheatleys literary achievement and present concrete evidence that her extant oeuvre merits still further scrutiny.
Author: James Colgrove
The first permanent Board of Health in the United States was created in response to a cholera outbreak in New York City in 1866. By the mid-twentieth century, thanks to landmark achievements in vaccinations, medical data collection, and community health, the NYC Department of Health had become the nations gold standard for public health. However, as the citys population grew in number and diversity, the department struggled to balance its efforts between the treatment of diseasessuch as AIDS, tuberculosis, and West Nile Virusand the prevention of illness-causing factors like lead paint, heroin addiction, homelessness, smoking, and unhealthy foods. In Epidemic City, historian of public health James Colgrove chronicles the challenges faced by the health department since New York Citys mid-twentieth-century peak in public health provision. This insightful volume draws on archival research and oral histories to examine how the provision of public health has adapted to the competing demands of diverse public needs, public perceptions, and political pressure. Epidemic City analyzes the perspectives and efforts of the people responsible for the citys public health from the 1960s to the presenta time that brought new challenges, such as budget and staffing shortages, and new threats like bioterrorism. Faced with controversies such as needle exchange programs and AIDS reporting, the health department struggled to maintain a delicate balance between its primary focus on illness prevention and the need to ensure public and political support for its activities. In the past decade, after the 9/11 attacks and bioterrorism scares partially diverted public health efforts from illness prevention to threat response, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden were still able to pass New Yorks Clean Indoor Air Act restricting smoking and significant regulations on trans-fats used by restaurants. This legislationpreventative in nature much like the departments original sanitary codereflects a return to the nineteenth century roots of public health, when public health measures were often overtly paternalistic. The assertive laws conceived by Frieden and executed by Bloomberg demonstrate how far the mandate of public health can extend when backed by committed government officials. Epidemic City provides a compelling historical analysis of the individuals and groups tasked with negotiating the fine line between public health and political considerations. By examining the departments successes and failures during the ambitious social programs of the 1960s, the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the struggles with poverty and homelessness in the 1980s and 1990s, and in the post-9/11 era, Epidemic City shows how the NYC Department of Health has defined the role and scope of public health services for the entire nation.
Author: Margot Mifflin
In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatmans friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinoisincluding the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white societyto her later years as a wealthy bankers wife in Texas.Oatmans story has since become legend, inspiring artworks, fiction, film, radio plays, and even an episode of Death Valley Days starring Ronald Reagan. Its themes, from the perils of religious utopianism to the permeable border between civilization and savagery, are deeply rooted in the American psyche. Oatmans blue tattoo was a cultural symbol that evoked both the imprint of her Mohave past and the lingering scars of westward expansion. It also served as a reminder of her deepest secret, fully explored here for the first time: she never wanted to go home.
Author: Wendy Mee, Jared Barnes, Roger Kjelgren, Richard Sutton, Teresa Cerny, and Craig Johnson
Today, native plants and water conservation are subjects of vital interest to cities, offices, homeowners, and agriculture alike, as all are affected by the growing shortage of water in the Intermountain region.This comprehensive volume provides specific information about shrubs, trees, grasses, forbs, and cacti that are native to most states in the Intermountain West, and that can be used in landscaping to conserve water, reflect and preserve the region's landscape character, and help protect its ecological integrity. The book is an invaluable guide for the professional landscaper, horticulturist, and others in the Intermountain nursery industry, as well as for the student, general reader, gardener, and homeowner.Water Wise is both convenient and comprehensive. The heart of the book presents hundreds of species, devoting a full page to each, with a description of appearance, habitat, landscape use, and other comments. Color photographs illustrate each plant described. A reader-friendly introduction provides important background on the ecology of the Intermountain West, along with full descriptions of native plant habitats and associations.An accessible resource of accurate native plant information for all readers, Water Wise will be indispensable to professional landscapers and amateurs alike.
Author: Ruth Trinidad Galván
Women Who Stay Behind examines the social, educational, and cultural resources rural Mexican women employ to creatively survive the conditions created by the migration of loved ones. Using narrative, research, and theory, Ruth Trinidad Galvan presents a hopeful picture of what is traditionally viewed as the abject circumstances of poor and working-class people in Mexico who are forced to migrate to survive. The book studies womens and families use of cultural knowledge, community activism, and teaching and learning spaces. Throughout, Trinidad Galvan provides answers to these questions: How does the migration of loved ones alter community, familial, and gender dynamics? And what social relations (convivencia), cultural knowledge, and women-centered pedagogies sustain womens survival (supervivencia)? Researchers, educators, and students interested in migration studies, gender studies, education, Latin American studies, and Mexican American studies will benefit from the ethnographic approach and theoretical insight of this groundbreaking work.
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new model of chronic diseasediagnosed on the basis of numerical deviations rather than symptoms and treated on a preventive basis before any overt signs of illness developthat arose in concert with a set of safe effective and highly marketable prescription drugs In Prescribing by Numbers physicianhistorian Jeremy A Greene examines the mechanisms by which drugs and chronic disease categories define one another within medical research clinical practice and pharmaceutical marketing and he explores how this interaction has profoundly altered the experience politics ethics and economy of health in latetwentiethcentury America Prescribing by Numbers highlights the complex historical role of pharmaceuticals in the transformation of disease categories Greene narrates the expanding definition of the three principal cardiovascular risk factorshypertension diabetes and high cholesteroleach intersecting with the career of a particular pharmaceutical agent Drawing on documents from corporate archives and contemporary pharmaceutical marketing literature in concert with the clinical literature and the records of researchers clinicians and public health advocates Greene produces a fascinating account of the expansion of the pharmaceutical treatment of chronic disease over the past fifty years While acknowledging the influence of pharmaceutical marketing on physicians Greene avoids demonizing drug companies Rather his provocative and comprehensive analysis sheds light on the increasing presence of the subjectively healthy but highly medicated individual in the American medical landscape suggesting how historical analysis can help to address the problems inherent in the program of pharmaceutical prevention
Author: Philipp Schönthaler. translated by Amanda DeMarco
What happens to the relationship between business and literature when storytelling becomes a privileged form of communication for organizations.Corporations love a good story. Microsoft employs a chief storyteller, who heads a team of twenty-five corporate storytellers. IBM, Coca-Cola, and the World Bank are among other organizations that have worked with storytelling methods. And, of course, Steve Jobs was famous for his storytelling. Today, narrative is a privileged form of communication for organizations. In Portrait of the Manager as a Young Author, Philipp Schonthaler explains this unlikely alliance between business and storytelling. The contradictions are immediately apparent. If, as the philosopher Hans Blumenberg writes, stories are told to pass the time, managers would seem to have little time to spare. And yet, Schonthaler reports, stories are useful in handling complexity. When digital information flows too quickly and exceeds the capacity of the human brain, narrative can provide communicative efficiency and effectiveness. Words and numbers both vouch for truth, are both instrumentalized by management, and are inextricably interdependent. What happens, if narrative becomes ubiquitous? Does the commercialization of narratives have an effect on literature? Through the lens of storytelling, Schonthaler explores the relationship between economics and literature and describes a form of writing that takes place in their shared spheres. Most books on storytelling in the corporate world are written by business writers; this book offers the perspective of an award-winning literary author, who considers both the impact of storytelling on business and the impact of business on literature.