Author: Guillaume Lachenal File Type: pdf After the Second World War, French colonial health services, armed with a newly discovered drug, made the eradication of sleeping sickness their top priority. A single injection of Lomidine (known as Pentamidine in the United States) promised to protect against infection for six months or longer. Mass campaigns of preventive lomidinization were launched with immense enthusiasm across Africa. But the drug proved to be both inefficient and dangerous. Contaminated injections caused bacterial infections that progressed to gangrene, killing dozens of people. Shockingly, the French physicians who administered the shots seemed to know the drugs risk while they obtained signed consent before giving Lomidine to French citizens, they administered it to Africans without their consentsometimes by force.In The Lomidine Files, Guillaume Lachenal traces the medicines trajectory from experimental trials during the Second World War, when it was introduced as a miracle cure for sleeping sickness, to its abandonment in the late 1950s, when a series of deadly incidents brought lomidinization campaigns to a grinding halt. He explores colonial doctors dangerously hubristic obsession with an Africa freed from disease and describes the terrible reactions caused by the drug, the resulting panic of colonial authorities, and the decades-long cover-up that followed.A fascinating material history that touches on the drugs manufacture and distribution, as well as the tragedies that followed in its path, The Lomidine Files resurrects a nearly forgotten scandal. Ultimately, it illuminates public health not only as a showcase of colonial humanism and a tool of control but also as an arena of mediocrity, powerlessness, and stupidity.

Author: Richard Powers File Type: epub After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2Richard Powersreturns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for exisiting.**Amazon.com ReviewCognitive neurologist and well-known writer team up to produce a machine that can pass a comprehensive exam in English literature, with predictably unpredictable results. Like The Gold Bug Variations, this is another of Powers wild, unforgettable novels encompassing science, philosophy, and the frailty of mankind. From Publishers Weekly Powers, in his mid-30s and with four well-received books under his belt (Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance The Gold Bug Variations etc.), is among our most prodigious young novelists, and without a doubt our most cerebral. He seems bent on proving the novel to be a form capable of housing all manner of human thought and expression art, music, genetic theory, linguistics and philosophy. In Galatea 2.2, Powers, known as an extremely private person, is writing about himself?Richard Powers, the cerebral author of four novels?in a most intimate fashion, detailing his loves, passions and failings. His objective, however, is nothing so mundane as self-portraiture. Typically, he has a bigger idea in exploring the nature of consciousness, he is trying to build a conscious novel in much the same way that the novels fictional Powers is trying to spark consciousness in a university computer. The result is a kind of double simulation of intelligence that is breathtakingly elegant. Powers the character, returns to a Midwestern university with a huge computer science department, after several years in Holland, where he has left behind the love of his life, who saw him through the first four books. As a visiting writer, his job is to bombard a computer network, which he comes to call Helen, with literature, music and conversation so that it will recognize beauty in some neuronal simulation, and therefore become conscious of it. Meanwhile, Powers reveals his life, including his career as a novelist (down to the mentioning of a rare picture of him in a PW interview four years ago). Its as if both Helen and the novel itself can be programmed into self-consciousness. In the course of tutoring Helen to be able to successfully interpret a piece of text in a manner indistinguishable from a human, Powers and Helen form an enchanting though eerie bond she has read all his books he knows her circuitry. Still, there remain mysteries that cant be accounted for by electron paths, in Helens case, or by a theory of the self, in Powerss case. In the end, Powers is left with the conviction he started with that intelligence is irreducible it cannot be known. Although parts of the book seem hastily done or weakly felt (the university folk are rather two-dimensional, and Powerss crush on a rail-thin, obnoxious grad student is simply unaccountable), these are minor flaws in an otherwise ingenious performance. 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: Brad Prager File Type: pdf After the Fact studies the terrain of Holocaust documentaries subsequent to the turn of the twenty-first century. Until now most studies have centered primarily on canonical films such as Shoah and Night and Fog, but over the course of the last ten years filmmaking practices have altered dramatically. Changing techniques, diminishing communities of survivors, and the publics response to familiar, even iconic imagery, have all challenged filmmakers to radically revise and newly envision how they depict the Holocaust. Innovative styles have emerged, including groundbreaking techniques of incorporating archival footage, survivor testimony, and reenactment. Carrying wider implications for the fields of Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Visual Studies, this book closely analyzes ten contemporary and internationally produced films, most of which have hardly been touched upon in the critical literature or elsewhere. **

Author: Michelle Keown File Type: pdf This interdisciplinary collection explores the confluence of American and British (neo)imperalism in the Pacific, as represented in various forms of Pacific discourse including literature, ethnography, film, painting, autobiography, journalism, and environmental discourse. It investigates the alliances and rivalries between these two colonial powers during the crucial transition period of the early-to-mid twentieth century, also exploring indigenous Pacific responses to Anglo-American imperialism during and beyond the decolonization period of the late twentieth century. While the relationship between Britain and the US has been analyzed through prominent forms of economic and cultural exchange between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, there is to date no sustained study of the relationship between British and US colonial expansion into the Pacific, which became central to ideas of developing European modernity in the late eighteenth century and has played a pivotal in the history of Anglo-American colonialism, from the establishment of plantation economies and settler colonies in the nineteenth century to various forms of military imperialism during and beyond the twentieth century. The wide range of discursive and expressive modes explored in this collection makes for a rich and multifaceted analysis of representations of, and responses to, Anglo-American imperialism, and is in keeping with the current interdisciplinary turn in postcolonial studies. **