Wisdom from a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist


Stuart A. Schlegel - 1999
    What he found was a group of people whose tolerant, gentle way of life would transform his own values and beliefs profoundly. Wisdom from a Rainforest is Schlegel's testament to his experience and to the Teduray people of Figel, from whom he learned such vital, lasting lessons.Schlegel's lively ethnography of the Teduray portrays how their behavior and traditions revolved around kindness and compassion for humans, animals, and the spirits sharing their worlds. Schlegel describes the Teduray's remarkable legal system and their strong story-telling tradition, their elaborate cosmology, and their ritual celebrations. At the same time, Schlegel recounts his own transformation--how his worldview as a member of an advanced, civilized society was shaken to the core by a so-called primitive people. He begins to realize how culturally determined his own values are and to see with great clarity how much the Teduray can teach him about gender equality, tolerance for difference, generosity, and cooperation.By turns funny, tender, and gripping, Wisdom from a Rainforest honors the Teduray's legacy and helps us see how much we can learn from a way of life so different from our own.

A Very Special Midwife


Gill Sanderson - 2005
     Dr Mike Donovan doesn’t believe in love at first sight – until he meets midwife Jenny Carson for the first time and is instantly hooked. He knows she’s the woman he’s been searching for, and won’t stop until he gets what he wants. Jenny isn’t so convinced; nicknamed “The Ice Woman”, she won’t let any man close to her after being burned by love in the past. Mike is determined to win over Jenny, and eventually they grow closer. But a devastating accident could threaten everything they’ve built together – can Mike thaw Jenny’s heart and keep the woman of his dreams?

A Life Stolen: My Father's Journey Through Alzheimer's


Vanessa Luther - 2014
    It’s an inside look into the day-to-day challenges facing not only the patient, but also the caregivers. For many years, her father exhibited signs of dementia, eventually becoming too significant to ignore. Everything culminated during an incident one night, after which her father was taken away, never to return to his home again. The disease changed him every day until he was a stranger. Then, it stole his life. Through the initial days at home to hospital stays, living in a memory care unit, rehab stints and eventually hospice care, this book reveals many of the struggles encountered while facing Alzheimer’s in a world not quite ready for it. It is based on actual events depicted exactly as they happened while travelling the heartbreaking and harrowing road through this horrific illness. Its purpose is to give guidance and insight to others caring for loved ones with this terrible affliction, whether it is in providing helpful information, feelings of support or simply words of encouragement. Most importantly, the hope is that it will make the road for others an easier one to travel. May the many tears in this journey be the fortitude that helps others deal with the adversity from this overwhelming disease.

Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist


Hortense Powdermaker - 1966
    An occasionally humorous and insightful look into what makes socities both similar and unique.

Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism


Kristen R. Ghodsee - 2011
    Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences with Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why it is that so many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. Ghodsee uses Bulgaria, the Eastern European nation where she has spent the most time, as a lens for exploring the broader transition from communism to democracy. She locates the growing nostalgia for the communist era in the disastrous, disorienting way that the transition was handled. The privatization process was contested and chaotic. A few well-connected foreigners and a new local class of oligarchs and criminals used the uncertainty of the transition process to take formerly state-owned assets for themselves. Ordinary people inevitably felt that they had been robbed. Many people lost their jobs just as the state social-support system disappeared. Lost in Transition portrays one of the most dramatic upheavals in modern history by describing the ways that it interrupted the rhythms of everyday lives, leaving confusion, frustration, and insecurity in its wake.

Life and Death in Assisted Living


A.C. Thompson - 2013
    What she and her family got was an introduction to what many think is the country’s next great health crisis.

An Army in Heaven


Kelley Jankowski - 2016
    Read about their accounts of Heaven and Hell, their visions of loved ones who have long traversed to the other side. Compassionate and compelling, this book retells their experiences. Their accounts are moving, edifying and sometimes disturbing, as cases of terrible abuse, neglect and even the demonic are also witnessed. Written by the nurse assigned to their care, An Army In Heaven is a compilation of their stories, what they saw on the other side and what they see as the veil thins during the dying process. It will change how you view life and most importantly, how you view death.

The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics


Tania Murray Li - 2007
    Focusing on attempts to improve landscapes and livelihoods in Indonesia, Tania Murray Li carefully exposes the practices that enable experts to diagnose problems and devise interventions, and the agency of people whose conduct is targeted for reform. Deftly integrating theory, ethnography, and history, she illuminates the work of colonial officials and missionaries; specialists in agriculture, hygiene, and credit; and political activists with their own schemes for guiding villagers toward better ways of life. She examines donor-funded initiatives that seek to integrate conservation with development through the participation of communities, and a one-billion-dollar program designed by the World Bank to optimize the social capital of villagers, inculcate new habits of competition and choice, and remake society from the bottom up.Demonstrating that the “will to improve” has a long and troubled history, Li identifies enduring continuities from the colonial period to the present. She explores the tools experts have used to set the conditions for reform—tools that combine the reshaping of desires with applications of force. Attending in detail to the highlands of Sulawesi, she shows how a series of interventions entangled with one another and tracks their results, ranging from wealth to famine, from compliance to political mobilization, and from new solidarities to oppositional identities and violent attack. The Will to Improve is an engaging read—conceptually innovative, empirically rich, and alive with the actions and reflections of the targets of improvement, people with their own critical analyses of the problems that beset them.

The Other End of the Stethoscope - 33 Insights for Excellent Patient Care


Marcus Engel - 2006
    Constantly changing policies. Increasing bureaucratic regulations. These are just a few of the challenges health care providers face every day; challenges that limit the ability to provide excellent patient care. Marcus' insights will give health care providers new and essential strategies to rediscover the magic and compassion between caregiver and patient.

Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History & Consumption


Jim Hogshire - 1999
    To Hogshire, pills are the quintessence of Western culture, embodying our desires, fears, ambivalence about life and death, health and freedom -- as well as our faith in the quick fix.Hogshire muses on pill naming and marketing, presents up-to-the-minute pill news, and discusses celebrities and their pills of choice. Along the way, he provides histories of drug manufacturers and examines how pills are the product of decades of scientific exploration and the result of billions of dollars in research.

Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert: My Life Among the Navajo People


Erica M. Elliott - 2019
    

Snake Oil And Other Preoccupations


John B. Diamond - 2001
    These chapters, based on his own experience and on researched fact, which were emailed each week to his editors at Random House, are both personal and poignant, hard hitting and controversial, tackling the issues raised by alternative medicine with total candour and his usual wit. The second half of this book features some of the best of Diamond's writing, including a selection of emails to colleagues and friends, articles from "The Times" and the "Jewish Chronicle" and other publications, together with excerpts from his final notebook. For seven years he wrote an immensely popular weekly column in "The Times" which, following his diagnosis with cancer, was given over to following the progress of the disease. As well as gaining him a Columnist of the Year award, it resulted in an avalanche of mail from thousands of his readers.

A Matter of Life and Death: Courage, compassion and the fight against coronavirus - a palliative care nurse's story


Kelly Critcher - 2021
    Day by day, wards were being cleared to make way for Covid-positive patients. Things were getting worse by the day. For the first time in my nursing career, I felt scared.As a palliative care nurse, it is Kelly Critcher's job to look death in the eye - to save a patient while the fight can still be won, and confront death with grace and kindness when it can't.In early 2020, everything changed for nurses on the NHS frontline. Working on Covid wards and the High Dependency Unit, Kelly spent the height of the coronavirus crisis at Northwick Park hospital - perhaps the UK hospital most deeply ravaged by the illness.She, and many others like her, battled tirelessly in a critical care unit pushed to breaking point, delivering the bad news and fighting the good fight, day-in, day-out, throughout the gravest test our health service has faced since its inception.Kelly's story weaves together her raw, emotional diaries from the COVID frontline with a broader reflection on the truths about a life spent caught between battling for her patients' lives and helping them face down death with courage and compassion. Bringing together the enormity of the last twelve months - and the scars it will leave - this is a book for our times.

The Student Nurse Handbook: A Survival Guide


Bethann Siviter - 2004
    It provides hints, tips and practical advice on aspects such as placements, reading research, living as a student and the nursing profession as a whole.

On Call with a Yorkshire Vet


Julian Norton - 2020
    He treats a meerkat with a broken tail from Great Ouseburn, a lame horse next to Almscliffe Crag, a Wagyu in Topcliffe and a Clydesdale horse in York. These and many more adventures are contained within...