Living Safely, Aging Well: A Guide to Preventing Injuries at Home
Author: Dorothy A. Drago, M.P.H. As we age, our sense of balance and our vision, hearing, and cognition become less sharp. Aging-related changes greatly increase our risk of injury. In Living Safely, Aging Well, nationally recognized safety expert Dorothy A. Drago spells out how to prevent injury while cooking, gardening, sleeping, drivingand just walking around the house. In the first part of the book, Drago describes the causes of injuries by typefalls, burns, poisoning, and asphyxiaand explains how to decrease the risk of each. She then explores the home environment room by room, pointing out potential hazards and explaining how to avoid them, for example, by installing night lights, eliminating glass coffee tables, and using baby monitors. Lively line drawings make it easy for readers to visualize risks and implement prevention techniques. Living Safely, Aging Well pays special attention to hazards encountered by people with Alzheimers disease and other forms of dementia. A chapter devoted to health literacy helps people and caregivers make the best use of the medical care system and a chapter on driving helps evaluate when it is no longer safe to be behind the wheel.
Author: Edward B. Ham
Rutebeuf was a thirteenth-century French troubadour. This work examines his portrayals of Louis IX, who he considered to be a fanatic. The prose of Rutebeuf, Edward Billings Ham argues, calls attention to the king's avarice and political ineptitude, and to the self-interest of his counselors and their preposterous incapacity for war.
Author: Paul M. Churchland
A noted philosopher draws on the empirical results and conceptual resources of cognitive neuroscience to address questions about the nature of knowledge.
Author: Mark Garrett Longaker
During the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputedso much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longakers study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studieswritten as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual historiesLongaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.
Author: Jurgen von Mahs
Los Angeles, California, and Berlin, Germany, have been dubbed "homeless capitals" for having the largest homeless populations of their respective countries. In Down and Out in Los Angeles and Berlin, Jürgen von Mahs provides an illuminating comparative analysis of the impact of social welfare policy on homelessness in these cities. He addresses the opportunity of people to overcome--or "exit"--homelessness and shows how Berlin, with its considerable social and economic investment for assisting its homeless has been as unsuccessful as Los Angeles.Drawing on fascinating ethnographic insights, von Mahs shows how homeless people in both cities face sociospatial exclusion-legal displacement for criminal activities, poor shelters in impoverished neighborhoods, as well as market barriers that restrict reintegration. Providing a necessary wake-up call, Down and Out in Los Angeles and Berlin addresses the critical public policy issues that can produce effective services to improve homeless people's chances for a lasting exit.
Author: Anne Innis Dagg
How do young and old social animals view each other? Are aged animals perceived by others as weaker? Or wiser? What is the relationship between age and power among social animals? Taking a cue from Frans de Waals seminal work examining the lives of chimpanzees, Anne Innis Dagg in this pioneering study probes the lives of older mammals and birds. Synthesizing the available scientific research and anecdotal evidence, she explores how aging affects the lives and behavior of animals ranging from elk to elephants and gulls to gorillas, examining such topics as longevity; how others in a group view senior members in regard to leadership, wisdom, and teaching; mating success; interactions with mates and offspring; how aging affects dominance; changes in aggressive behavior and adaptability; and death and dying. At once instructive and compelling, this theme-spanning book reveals the complex nature of maturity in scores of social species and shows that animal behavior often displays the same diversity we find in ourselves.
Author: Richard Shelton
Once in a while, a book comes along that redefines the concept of family. Frank McCourt did it with Angelas Ashes; Annie Dillard did it with An American Childhood. In Nobody Rich or Famous, author Richard Shelton (b. 1933) immerses us in the hardscrabble lives of his Boise, Idaho, clan during the 1930s and 40s. Using a framework of journals, road trips, and artful storytelling, Shelton traces three generations of women. We meet his mother, Hazel, a model of western respectability, who carefully dresses in her finest clothes before walking into a bar and emptying a loaded handgun in the general direction of her husband. We meet his great-grandmother, Josephine, who homesteads a sod shanty and dies too young on the Kansas prairie. We follow his grandmother, Charlotte, as she grows from a live-in servant girl to a fiddle-playing schoolteacher who burns through two marriages before taking up with the iceman. Known for his storytelling, Shelton crafts a tale of poverty and its attendant sorrows: alcoholism, neglect, and abuse. But the tenacity of the human spirit shines through. This is an epic tale of Steinbeckian proportions, but it is not fiction. This is memoir in its finest tradition, illuminating todays cultural chasm between the haves and have-nots. In the authors words, Nobody Rich or Famous is the story of a family and how it got that way.
The origin of law in the Hebrew Bible has long been the subject of scholarly debate Until recently the historicocritical methodologies of the academy have yielded unsatisfactory conclusions concerning the source of these laws which are woven through biblical narratives In this original and provocative study Calum Carmichaela leading scholar of biblical law and rhetoricsuggests that Hebrew law was inspired by the study of the narratives in Genesis through 2 Kings Discussing particular laws found in the book of Leviticusaddressing issues such as the Day of Atonement consumption of meat that still has blood the Jubilee year sexual and bodily contamination and the treatment of slavesCarmichael links each to a narrative He contends that biblical laws did not emerge from social imperatives in ancient Israel but instead from the careful retrospective study of the nations history and identity