Brain-Defying Tales

Brain-Defying Tales
Author: Byron Lanning
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2000-07-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595096123

In this hilarious collection of stories, Byron Lanning lampoons everything from art, religion, ethics, politics, poetry, to feminism, and masculinism. He makes the absurd seem preposterous. A hypertext novel injures its readers when they click on the hyperlinks. A woman orders a Red Velvet Bomb Recipe at a convention of Paramilitarists, Survivalists, and Insane Boy Scouts. She thinks it costs only $9.50, but it actually costs $950. A Hassidic gangster Heimi Day of Atonement Spielman attempts to take over the bagel industry in New York City. Wild Voilà Fusillade, an artist who works with firearms, invents the school of abstract percussionistic art. The rooster Cock-a-Dude searches for an eerie suppository with magic healing powers to cure his dying father, the megafascist dictator of a pop psycho arcadia. Tannhoosier, a slam poet from Indiana, develops a new form of poetry called appropriation that raises the wrath of the Poet Laureate, and he threatens to take away his poetic license.

The Musical Brain: And Other Stories

The Musical Brain: And Other Stories
Author: César Aira
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2015-03-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 081122418X

A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of micro-fiction. A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, César Aira–the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long–The Musical Brain & Other Stories comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery

When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery
Author: Frank Vertosick Jr.
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2008-03-17
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0393344029

The story of one man's evolution from naive and ambitious young intern to world-class neurosurgeon. With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick’s patients and unsparing yet fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain—the culmination of decades spent struggling to learn an unforgiving craft—illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

Tales from Both Sides of the Brain (Enhanced Edition)

Tales from Both Sides of the Brain (Enhanced Edition)
Author: Michael S. Gazzaniga
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2015-02-24
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0062390368

With extensive video footage of his trailblazing cognitive experiments, Michael Gazzaniga—the “father of cognitive neuroscience”—illuminates the discoveries behind his groundbreaking work in this enhanced digital edition of Tales from Both Sides of the Brain. Michael S. Gazzaniga, one of the most important neuroscientists of the twentieth century, gives us an exciting behind-the-scenes look at his seminal work on that unlikely couple, the right and left brain. Foreword by Steven Pinker. In the mid-twentieth century, Michael S. Gazzaniga, “the father of cognitive neuroscience,” was part of a team of pioneering neuroscientists who developed the now foundational split-brain brain theory: the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from one another and have different strengths. In Tales from Both Sides of the Brain, Gazzaniga tells the impassioned story of his life in science and his decades-long journey to understand how the separate spheres of our brains communicate and miscommunicate with their separate agendas. By turns humorous and moving, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain interweaves Gazzaniga’s scientific achievements with his reflections on the challenges and thrills of working as a scientist. In his engaging and accessible style, he paints a vivid portrait not only of his discovery of split-brain theory, but also of his comrades in arms—the many patients, friends, and family who have accompanied him on this wild ride of intellectual discovery.

Bryson City Tales

Bryson City Tales
Author: Walt Larimore
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2009-08-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0310861241

Captivating stories of how a young doctor's first year of medical practice in the Smoky Mountains shaped his practice of life and faith. The little mountain hamlet of Bryson City, North Carolina, offers more than dazzling vistas. For Walt Larimore, a young "flatlander" physician setting up his first practice, the town presents its peculiar challenges as well. With the winsomeness of a James Herriott book, Bryson City Tales sweeps you into a world of colorful characters, the texture of Smoky Mountain life, and the warmth, humor, quirks, and struggles of a small country town. It's a world where the family doctor is also the emergency physician, the coroner, and the obstetrician, and where wilderness medicine is part of the job, search-and-rescue calls in the national forest are a way of life, and the next patient just may be somebody's livestock or pet. Bryson City Tales is the tender and insightful chronicle of a young man's rite of passage from medical student to family physician. Laughter and adventure await you in these pages, and lessons learned from Bryson City's unforgettable residents.

The Undiscovered Mind

The Undiscovered Mind
Author: John Horgan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2000-11-14
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0684865785

A respected journalist explores the fields of science that try to explain the mysteries of the human mind, arguing that science has done little to plumb the depths of our minds and cannot ever rationally explain all of human behavior.

Defy Your Doctor and Be Healed

Defy Your Doctor and Be Healed
Author: C. Thomas Corriher
Publisher: Health Wyze Media
Total Pages: 614
Release: 2013-09-25
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1492739634

Without any fear of repercussion or rejection, Thomas and Sarah will lead you through a compelling, never-before-seen exposure of widespread fraud in mainstream and alternative medicine in Defy Your Doctor and Be Healed. This book is meant to be more than just an investigation of fraudulent medicine -- it's intended to save your life. It's sure to be provocative as you'll learn much of what you're told or sold by medical 'authorities' and the media can be reduced to cleverly devised narratives or pathways for profiteering. As you learn the ins-and-outs, you'll be given the tools and knowledge to take charge of your health with confidence. As the veteran "health detectives" of Health Wyze Media, Thomas and Sarah have earned enduring reputations for asking tough questions and getting unpopular answers. They are the producers of The Health Wyze Report, a hard, in-depth look at the truth behind today's orthodox and alternative medicine, and "The Cancer Report", a documentary about the cancer industry and its alternatives. Defy Your Doctor and Be Healed is the culmination of seven years of uncompromising medical research and reporting. Its premise is simple: it approaches standard and alternative medicine from a scientific standpoint, examining their goods and ills. It also asserts that the human body has natural healing abilities, and that the answers to most of our health dilemmas are so close to us that we're unable to see them.

The Tale of Dark Africa

The Tale of Dark Africa
Author: By the Son of the Soil: Stone Obi
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2015-04-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1480919179

The Son of the Soil: Stone Obi’s The Tale of Dark Africa will open your eyes to the power of tradition and belief that exist within a people, a power that modern religion can’t totally wipe away. “I want people to see who we are,” writes the author. “We Africans have not detached from our folk’s way of thinking, and our ancestral conception has affected us into the 21st century as we continue to entertain such beliefs.” Part manifesto, part folk stories, Tale of Dark Africa explores the dark undertones of traditional African mythology and what issues its tenacious hold on Obi’s home country of Nigeria—and on Africa as a whole—may cause in the modern world. “Slavery, poverty, and wars are not the cause of our sufferings,” Obi writes. Instead, suffering comes from “the way we think and process information from a cultural and ancestral mentality.” In this way, the author seeks to draw the links between Africa’s suffering and the world’s. The tale of Dark Africa is the tale of the whole wide world.