She knew instantly that her decision to work in general practice was the ‘biggest and worst mistake of her life’. Fortunately, however, this did not deter her from continuing in general practice, and this fascinating memoir (spanning half a century) is testament to her resilience and professionalism, as well as her pragmatic and charismatic personality. She shares real stories about real people in this intriguing book. Some stories are truly heart-breaking and will have you reaching for the tissues (such as the times when she has lost patients, and encountered and supported abused children and rape victims). But it isn’t all serious. There are lots of light-hearted and heart-warming moments too, such as the stories about Jessie-dog – her bodyguard when she made home visits, and the time when she helped a large (and desperately in need) family to get rehoused, and her time as a country GP. She also recalls with honesty and candidness, the prejudice and unimaginable pressure she had to contend with, as a young female GP in the 1960s. As well as a plethora of fascinating stories, experiences and case studies, this book also gives us, as 21st Century readers, a glimpse into the rapid changes in general practice and the NHS in general. Whether you’re in general practice, or you’re a medical professional, or you have a penchant for all kinds of autobiographies/memoirs, you will find this a thought-provoking and captivating book that’s impossible to put down. Take a peek at the ‘Look Inside’ feature now and be prepared to be instantly intrigued.

    The emphasis is, instead, on the myriad ways in which the universe presents itself to us--and how, as observers and participants in its processes, we respond to it. "Life, like a dome of many-colored glass," wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley, "stains the white radiance of eternity." The author seeks here to explore the variety that gives life its beauty.Taken from Dyson's recent public lectures--delivered to audiences with no specialized knowledge in hard sciences--the book begins with a consideration of the practical and political questions surrounding biotechnology. As he seeks how best to explain the place of life in the universe, Dyson then moves from the ethical to the purely scientific. The book concludes with an attempt to understand the implications of biology for philosophy and religion.The pieces in this collection touch on numerous disciplines, from astronomy and ecology to neurology and theology, speaking to the lay reader as well as to the scientist. As always, Dyson's view of human nature and behavior is balanced, and his predictions of a world to come serve primarily as a means for thinking about the world as it is today.

    Each chapter presents personal stories of women living in cities, small towns and villages in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the three lands to which Nighat Gandhi belongs. In writing their stories, she attempts to break the silence enshrouding Muslim women's sexuality and the ways in which they negotiate the restrictions placed on their freedoms within the framework of their culture. Women like Ghazala, who prefers the life of a second wife, 'living like a married single woman', to being bound within the ties of a conventional marriage, Nusrat and QT who believe theirs is a normal marriage, except that they are both women. Nisho, who refuses to accept that her trans-sexuality should deny her the right to love and Firdaus, writer and feminist, who can walk out of a loveless marriage but not give up on love, with or without marriage. Nighat also explores her own story as a woman who dared to make choices that pitted her against her family and cultures. Alternative Realities is her jihad or struggle to deconstruct the demeaning stereotypes that prevail about all Muslim women. It is a reflection of the myriad ways in which, despite these misogynistic forces, they continue to weave webs of love and peace in their own lives and in the lives of those they live with.

    But, despite appearances, these are not dogs—they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken—imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time in order to witness the process of domestication. This is the extraordinary, untold story of this remarkable undertaking. Most accounts of the natural evolution of wolves place it over a span of about 15,000 years, but within a decade, Belyaev and Trut’s fox breeding experiments had resulted in puppy-like foxes with floppy ears, piebald spots, and curly tails. Along with these physical changes came genetic and behavioral changes, as well. The foxes were bred using selection criteria for tameness, and with each generation, they became increasingly interested in human companionship. Trut has been there the whole time, and has been the lead scientist on this work since Belyaev’s death in 1985, and with Lee Dugatkin, biologist and science writer, she tells the story of the adventure, science, politics, and love behind it all.  In How to Tame a Fox, Dugatkin and Trut take us inside this path-breaking experiment in the midst of the brutal winters of Siberia to reveal how scientific history is made and continues to be made today. To date, fifty-six generations of foxes have been domesticated, and we continue to learn significant lessons from them about the genetic and behavioral evolution of domesticated animals. How to Tame a Fox offers an incredible tale of scientists at work, while also celebrating the deep attachments that have brought humans and animals together throughout time.

    Eat no meat from Monday through Friday. During the weekends, you're back to being a carnivore. Hill, who founded the eco-blog treehugger.com, has expanded the popular short talk he gave at TED 2010 with a life-changing digital book that explores the personal, economic, and societal benefits of moving meat out of your diet. Don't fear that vegetarian dishes all taste like sawdust. Hill includes great-tasting veggie recipes to get you started.

    David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered. Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world. When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet. Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.

    Mark Plaster takes readers beyond the ambulance bay doors into the stranger-than-fiction world of the Emergency Department. By turns heart-warming and gut-wrenching, "Night Shift" chronicles the ebb and flow of human life, in all of its unvarnished glory, as it passes through the doors of the ED.

    Why are a quarter of a billion sperm cells needed to fertilize one egg? Are women really fertile for only a few days each month? How long should women breast-feed? In How We Do It, primatologist Robert Martin draws on forty years of research to locate the origins of everything from sex cells to baby care—and to reveal what’s really �natural” when it comes to making and raising babies. He acknowledges that although it’s not realistic to reproduce like our ancestors did, there are surprising consequences to behavior we take for granted, such as bottle feeding, cesarean sections, and in vitro fertilization. How We Do It shows that once we understand our evolutionary past, we can consider what worked, what didn’t, and what it all means for the future of our species.

    Angier takes readers on a mesmerizing tour of female anatomy and physiology that explores everything from organs to orgasm, and delves into topics such as exercise, menopause, and the mysterious properties of breast milk.A self-proclaimed "scientific fantasia of womanhood." Woman ultimately challenges widely accepted Darwinian-based gender stereotypes. Angier shows how cultural biases have influenced research in evolutionary psychology (the study of the biological bases of behavior) and consequently led to dubious conclusions about "female nature." such as the idea that women are innately monogamous while men are natural philanderers.But Angier doesn't just point fingers; she offers optimistic alternatives and transcends feminist polemics with an enlightened subversiveness that makes for a joyful, fresh vision of womanhood. Woman is a seminal work that will endure as an essential read for anyone intersted in how biology affects who we are as women, as men, and as human beings.

    Hodges Supreme Court decision in 2015, sexual identity has dominated both public discourse and cultural trends--and yet, no historical phenomenon is its own cause. From Augustine to Marx, various views and perspectives have contributed to the modern understanding of self. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman carefully analyzes the roots and development of the sexual revolution as a symptom, rather than the cause, of the human search for identity. This timely exploration of the history of thought behind the sexual revolution teaches readers about the past, brings clarity to the present, and gives guidance for the future as Christians navigate the culture's ever-changing search for identity.

    In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.The World Without Us reveals how, just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations, and how, as the world's cities crumble, asphalt jungles would give way to real ones. It describes the distinct ways that organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild, how billions more birds would flourish, and how cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. Drawing on the expertise of engineers, atmospheric scientists, art conservators, zoologists, oil refiners, marine biologists, astrophysicists, religious leaders from rabbis to the Dalai Lama, and paleontologists—who describe a prehuman world inhabited by megafauna like giant sloths that stood taller than mammoths—Weisman illustrates what the planet might be like today, if not for us.From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth's tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn't depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has.

    It tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns in a precise account of developments in reproductive anatomy and physiology. We cannot fail to recognize the players in Thomas Laqueur's story--the human sexual organs and pleasures, food, blood, semen, egg, sperm--but we will be amazed at the plots into which they have been woven by scientists, political activists, literary figures, and theorists of every stripe.Laqueur begins with the question of why, in the late eighteenth century, woman's orgasm came to be regarded as irrelevant to conception, and he then proceeds to retrace the dramatic changes in Western views of sexual characteristics over two millennia. Along the way, two "master plots" emerge. In the one-sex story, woman is an imperfect version of man, and her anatomy and physiology are construed accordingly: the vagina is seen as an interior penis, the womb as a scrotum, the ovaries as testicles. The body is thus a representation, not the foundation, of social gender. The second plot tends to dominate post-Enlightenment thinking while the one-sex model is firmly rooted in classical learning. The two-sex story says that the body determines gender differences, that woman is the opposite of man with incommensurably different organs, functions, and feelings. The two plots overlap; neither ever holds a monopoly. Science may establish many new facts, but even so, Laqueur argues, science was only providing a new way of speaking, a rhetoric and not a key to female liberation or to social progress. Making Sex ends with Freud, who denied the neurological evidence to insist that, as a girl becomes a woman, the locus of her sexual pleasure shifts from the clitoris to the vagina; she becomes what culture demands despite, not because of, the body. Turning Freud's famous dictum around, Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice.This is a powerful story, written with verve and a keen sense of telling detail (be it technically rigorous or scabrously fanciful). Making Sex will stimulate thought, whether argument or surprised agreement, in a wide range of readers.

    Maggie was shot 17 times and subjected to cruelty and torture, before being rescued from Lebanon and brought to live in the UK by a determined and loving young woman called Kasey.As Maggie struggled to overcome her injuries, every day was a fight to rehabilitate her. But Kasey was convinced that what she had found in this little dog was someone just as determined to live and love as she was.This is the incredible story of their journey together: a story of hope, unconditional love and never giving up.

    While researching a recent "New York Times Magazine" cover story about chimpanzees, Charles Siebert visited a retirement home for former ape movie stars and circus entertainers in Wauchula, Florida known as the Center for Great Apes. There Siebert encountered Roger, a twenty-eight-year-old former Ringling Brothers star who seemed convinced he knew the author from some other time and place. Haunted by Roger's response, Siebert takes up residence at the Center for Great Apes and, in the course of one late-night visit to a sleepless Roger's quarters, gets to the bottom of this mysterious connection between himself and his simian counterpart.The result is "The Wauchula Woods Accord," a strikingly written, wide-ranging physical and metaphysical foray into the increasingly fraught frontier between humans and other animals; a journey that encompasses many of the author's encounters with chimpanzees and other animals, as well as the latest scientific discoveries that underscore our intimate biological bonds not only with our nearest kin, but with far more remote-seeming life-forms. By journey's end, the reader arrives at a deeper understanding both of Roger and of our numerous other animal selves, a recognition--an accord-- that carries a new sense of responsibility for how we view and treat all animals, including ourselves.

    In Holland, dogs are caressed more than people. Not as thoroughly, though: that one spot, somewhere down below, generally remains untouched …” Generally, but certainly not always. Kinsey’s research showed that 8 per cent of men and 3.5 per cent of women had had sex with an animal, and that in rural areas the figure for men was closer to 50 per cent. Yet bestiality is almost universally condemned. While our love for animals is extolled as noble and “natural,” all erotic elements in the relationship between humans and other species are vilified and proscribed, thus consigning them to the realm of exotic pornography or crude innuendo.Even so, something remains of physical love for animals. In different forms, sublimated or occasionally celebrated, its traces can be found throughout art and popular culture: in Leda and the Swan, Beauty and the Beast or the Lorelei; in a lubricious menagerie of satyrs and centaurs, wolfmen and vampires, all the way through to King Kong and Fritz the Cat, pony clubs and amorous dolphins, or even advertisements for luxury catfoods.Dearest Pet uncovers and explores those traces, illuminating the ambivalence of human attitudes to cross-species sexuality. Its author, the biologist and broadcaster Midas Dekkers, has analysed bestiality in all its aspects—physical, psychological and legal—and examined its representations in religion and mythology, art and literature, pornography and advertising. Beautifully—and sometimes bizarrely—illustrated, his book is neither drily academic nor pruriently trivial, but erudite, witty and challenging: the first history of the last taboo. A book for animal lovers, and for those who are just their good friends.