Genius on the Edge

Genius on the Edge
Author: Gerald Imber
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2010-02-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Genius on the Edge introduces the public to the man who revolutionized modern surgery at the same time it weaves a compelling biography with a fascinating tour of American medicine at the turn of the 19th century. Coming of age in the wake of the Civil War, William Stewart Halsted became a doctor in an era when surgery was a dangerous game of chance. By the time of his death in 1922, Halsted had transformed surgery and had pioneered techniques and procedures that are routine in today's operating rooms. But this came at a high price-drug addiction and alienation from his friends and family. His enormous professional accomplishments, eccentric personal behavior, and lifetime of drug addiction defy conventional wisdom. In the first comprehensive portrait of this complex and indisputably brilliant man, author Gerald Imber-a renowned plastic surgeon himself-takes readers to the upper echelons of society in New York City and Baltimore, blending tales of Gilded Age decadence with captivating accounts from the front lines of medical discovery. Combining the historical atmosphere of The Alienist with an unconventional hero, Genius on the Edge celebrates one of history's most daring doctors. Book jacket.

Ayrton Senna

Ayrton Senna
Author: Christopher Hilton
Publisher:
Total Pages: 281
Release: 1991
Genre: Automobile racing drivers
ISBN: 9780552137546

From his World Championship victory in 1988 to his controversial disputes the following year and finally to his recapture of the title in 1990, Ayrton Senna has regularly made the headlines. Yet many regard him as a shy and introverted personality.

Strokes of Genius

Strokes of Genius
Author: Eric Chaline
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1780238908

What could be better than diving into cool water on a hot day? In this enormously enjoyable and informative history of swimming, Eric Chaline sums up this most summery of moments with one phrase: pleasure beckons at the water’s edge. Strokes of Genius traces the history of swimming from the first civilizations to its current worldwide popularity as a sport, fitness pastime, and leisure activity. Chaline explores swimming’s role in ritual, early trade and manufacturing, warfare, and medicine, before describing its transformation in the early modern period into a leisure activity and a competitive sport—the necessary precursors that have made it the most common physical pastime in the developed world. The book celebrates the physicality and sensuality of swimming—attributes that Chaline argues could have contributed to the evolution of the human species. Swimming, like other disciplines that use repetitive movements to train the body and quiet the mind, is also a means of spiritual awakening—a personal journey of discovery. Swimming has attained the status of a cultural marker, denoting eroticism, leisure, endurance, adventure, exploration, and excellence. Strokes of Genius shows that there is not a single story of human swimming, but many currents that merge, diverge, and remerge. Chaline argues that swimming will become particularly important as we look toward a warmer future in which our survival may depend on our ability to adapt to life in an aquatic world.

Genius Foods

Genius Foods
Author: Max Lugavere
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2018-03-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0062562894

New York Times Bestseller Discover the critical link between your brain and the food you eat and change the way your brain ages, in this cutting-edge, practical guide to eliminating brain fog, optimizing brain health, and achieving peak mental performance from media personality and leading voice in health Max Lugavere. After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max Lugavere put his successful media career on hold to learn everything he could about brain health and performance. For the better half of a decade, he consumed the most up-to-date scientific research, talked to dozens of leading scientists and clinicians around the world, and visited the country’s best neurology departments—all in the hopes of understanding his mother’s condition. Now, in Genius Foods, Lugavere presents a comprehensive guide to brain optimization. He uncovers the stunning link between our dietary and lifestyle choices and our brain functions, revealing how the foods you eat directly affect your ability to focus, learn, remember, create, analyze new ideas, and maintain a balanced mood. Weaving together pioneering research on dementia prevention, cognitive optimization, and nutritional psychiatry, Lugavere distills groundbreaking science into actionable lifestyle changes. He shares invaluable insights into how to improve your brain power, including the nutrients that can boost your memory and improve mental clarity (and where to find them); the foods and tactics that can energize and rejuvenate your brain, no matter your age; a brain-boosting fat-loss method so powerful it has been called “biochemical liposuction”; and the foods that can improve your happiness, both now and for the long term. With Genius Foods, Lugavere offers a cutting-edge yet practical road map to eliminating brain fog and optimizing the brain’s health and performance today—and decades into the future.

Flash of Genius

Flash of Genius
Author: John Seabrook
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2008-09-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780312535728

Essays explore inspiration and entrepreneurship in everyday Americans, including the story of Bob Kearns, who invented the intermittent windshield wiper.

Journey Through Genius

Journey Through Genius
Author: William Dunham
Publisher: Penguin Books
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1991-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Like masterpieces of art, music, and literature, great mathematical theorems are creative milestones, works of genius destined to last forever. Now William Dunham gives them the attention they deserve. Dunham places each theorem within its historical context and explores the very human and often turbulent life of the creator — from Archimedes, the absentminded theoretician whose absorption in his work often precluded eating or bathing, to Gerolamo Cardano, the sixteenth-century mathematician whose accomplishments flourished despite a bizarre array of misadventures, to the paranoid genius of modern times, Georg Cantor. He also provides step-by-step proofs for the theorems, each easily accessible to readers with no more than a knowledge of high school mathematics. A rare combination of the historical, biographical, and mathematical, Journey Through Genius is a fascinating introduction to a neglected field of human creativity. “It is mathematics presented as a series of works of art; a fascinating lingering over individual examples of ingenuity and insight. It is mathematics by lightning flash.” —Isaac Asimov

Partial Genius

Partial Genius
Author: Mary Biddinger
Publisher:
Total Pages: 60
Release: 2019-08-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781625570062

Poetry. "I love this book so much. A work of meticulous craft and profound originality, Mary Biddinger's newest collection of prose poems is one of the best books I've read on our historical moment and the decades that led to it. PARTIAL GENIUS reads like a dossier of the psychological landscape of late capitalist America and the end of empire. In the tradition of John Ashbery, but wholly original in her own vision and voice, Biddinger draws from a deep well of poetic intellect and wit to illuminate the existential threats and imaginative possibilities of our collective self-destruction. In 'The Subject Pool' the speaker watches a man tattoo AU COURANT around her thigh. The tattoo artist has no idea. Every poem is chock-full of revelations in every detail. Reading this book felt like sitting by the fire in some secret location with a double agent, smoking her pipe telling tales of all that went down right in front of our faces, while we were all driven to distraction by outrage. To paraphrase Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, She's got it all in this book."--Heather Derr-Smith "'How many days since you began your last panic...?' Mary Biddinger asks in her latest collection. Quirky, imaginative, and wry in tone, PARTIAL GENIUS is a book that thwarts expectation, turns convention on its head, surprises and delights. Within a narrative scaffolded like a twisting stairway or maze-like hall, these fascinating poems feature high school reunions, job interviews, broken dioramas, and birth control pills; they showcase apologies, parlor games, and consolation prizes, intricacies, illusions, and tricks. Comfort is found in a bar of bathroom soap. An assistant manager wonders why a blazer is named for fire. A radio is implanted in the chest as a companion to the heart. Spheres of uncertainty juxtaposed against landscapes of failure create the book's complex beauty and dangerous edge, as Biddinger claims, 'The best part of figure skating was getting cut.' PARTIAL GENIUS comes to us as both a study of despair and a gleaming beacon of hope."--Jennifer Militello

The Invention of Surgery

The Invention of Surgery
Author: David Schneider
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1643133896

Written by an author with plenty of experience holding a scalpel, Dr. David Schneider’s The Invention of Surgery is an in-depth biography of the practice that has leapt forward over the centuries from the dangerous guesswork of ancient Greek physicians through the world-changing developments of anesthesia and antiseptic operating rooms to the “implant revolution” of the twentieth century.The Invention of Surgery is history of surgery that explains this dramatic, world-changing progress and highlights the personalities of the discipline's most dynamic historical figures. It links together the lives of the pioneering scientists who first understood what causes disease and how surgery could powerfully intercede in people’s lives, and then shows how the rise of surgery intersected with many of the greatest medical breakthroughs of the last century. And as Schneider argues, surgery has not finished transforming; new technologies are constantly reinventing both the practice of surgery and the nature of the objects we are permanently implanting in our bodies. Schneider considers these latest developments, asking “What’s next?” and analyzing how our conception of surgery has changed alongside our evolving ideas of medicine, technology, and our bodies.