It seems like every day society faces a new ethical challenge raised by a scientific innovation. Human genetic engineering, stem cell research, face... transplantation, synthetic biology - all were science fiction only a few decades ago, but now are all reality. How do we as a society decide whether these technologies are ethical? For decades professional bioethicists have served as mediators between a busy public and its decision-makers, helping people understand their own ethical concerns, framing arguments, discrediting illogical claims, and supporting promising ones. These bioethicists play an instrumental role in guiding governments' ethical policy decisions, consulting for hospitals faced with vital decisions, and advising institutions that conduct research on humans. Although the bioethics profession has functioned effectively for many years, it is now in crisis. Policy-makers are less inclined to take the advice of bioethics professionals, with many observers saying that bioethics debates have simply become partisan politics with dueling democratic and republican bioethicists. While this crisis is contained to the task of recommending ethical policy to the government, there is risk that it will spread to the other tasks conducted by bioethicists. To understand how this crisis came about and to arrive at a solution, John H. Evans closely examines the history of the bioethics profession. Bioethics debates were originally dominated by theologians, but came to be dominated by the emerging bioethics profession due to the subtle and slow involvement of the government as the primary consumer of bioethical arguments. After the 1980s, however, the views of the government changed, making bioethical arguments less legitimate. Exploring the sociological processes that lead to the evolution of bioethics to where it is today, Evans proposes a radical solution to the crisis. Bioethicists must give up its inessential functions, change the way they make ethical arguments, and make conscious and explicit steps toward re-establishing the profession's legitimacy as a mediator between the public and government decision-makers."John Evans provides a trenchant reconstruction of the waxing and waning influence of theology on the bioethics canon, as well as an original proposal for a social science-based bioethics. This book will fascinate and instruct anyone interested in where we have been and where we should go in our societal conversation about deep human values."- Jonathan Moreno, University of Pennsylvania

Combining the analytical tools of cinema studies with insights from clinical practice focused on eating disorders, Body Shots offers a compelling case... for widespread media literacy to combat the effects of the "eating disordered culture" represented in Hollywood productions and popular images of celebrity life.

"The most powerful book of its kind I've ever read.... Extraordinary powers of observation, generalization, and depth."—Oliver Sacks, author of The... Man Who Mistook His Wife For a HatWinner of the Columbia University Lionel Trilling Award. Robert Murphy was in the prime of his career as an anthropologist when he felt the first symptom of a malady that would ultimately take him on an odyssey stranger than any field trip to the Amazon: a tumor of the spinal cord that progressed slowly and irreversibly into quadriplegia. In this gripping account, Murphy explores society's fears, myths, and misunderstandings about disability, and the damage they inflict. He reports how paralysis—like all disabilities—assaults people's identity, social standing, and ties with others, while at the same time making the love of life burn even more fiercely.

This widely acclaimed study of biblical anthropology is available once more along with a substantial new preface by the author. Fully engaged with... theological, philosophical, and scientific discussions on the nature of human persons and their destiny beyond the grave, John Cooper's defense of "holistic dualism" remains the most satisfying and biblical response to come from the monism-dualism debate. First published in 1989, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting is required reading for Christian philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and students interested in the mind-body question.

In 1918 the People’s Commissariat of Public Health began a quest to protect the health of all Soviet citizens, but health became more than a political... platform or a tactical decision. The Soviets defined and categorized the world by interpreting political orthodoxy and citizenship in terms of hygiene. The assumed political, social, and cultural benefits of a regulated, healthy lifestyle informed the construction of Soviet institutions and identity. Cleanliness developed into a political statement that extended from domestic maintenance to leisure choices and revealed gender, ethnic, and class prejudices. Dirt denoted the past and poor politics; health and cleanliness signified mental acuity, political orthodoxy, and modernity.            Health, though essential to the revolutionary vision and crucial to Soviet plans for utopia, has been neglected by traditional histories caught up in Cold War debates. The Body Soviet recovers this significant aspect of Soviet thought by providing a cross-disciplinary, comparative history of Soviet health programs that draws upon rich sources of health care propaganda, including posters, plays, museum displays, films, and mock trials. The analysis of propaganda makes The Body Soviet more than an institutional history; it is also an insightful critique of the ideologies of the body fabricated by health organizations.

In the 20 years since the publication of the first edition of Bodyspace the knowledge base upon which ergonomics rests has increased significantly. The... need for an authoritative, contemporary and, above all, usable reference is therefore great. This third edition maintains the same content and structure as previous editions, but updates the material and references to reflect recent developments in the field. The book has been substantially revised to include new research and anthropometric surveys, the latest techniques, and changes in legislation that have taken place in recent years. New coverage in the third edition: Guidance on design strategies and practical advice on conducting trials Overview of recent advances in simulation and digital human modes Dynamic seating ·         Recent work on hand/handle interface Computer input devices ·         Laptop computer use and children’s use of computers ·         Design for an aging population and accessibility for people with disabilities ·         New approaches to risk management and new assessment tools, legislation, and standards As the previous two editions have shown, Bodyspace is an example of the unusual: a text that is a favorite among academics and practitioners. Losing none of the features that made previous editions so popular, the author skillfully integrates new knowledge into the existing text without sacrificing the easily accessible style that makes this book unique. More than just a reference text, this authoritative book clearly delineates the field of ergonomics.

Body Speech is the quite language of watching how people react with the use of their body based on the information they are taking in. Watch as meeting... go forth and learn how to read the people sitting across from you.

BodyStories is a book that engages the general reader as well as the serious student of anatomy. Thirty-one days of learning sessions heighten awareness... about each bone and body system and provide self-guided studies. The book draws on Ms. Olsen's thirty years as a dancer and teacher of anatomy to show how our attitudes and approaches to our body affect us day to day. Amusing and insightful personal stories enliven the text and provide ways of working with the body for efficiency and for healing. BodyStories is used as a primary text in college dance departments, massage schools, and yoga training programs internationally.

For readers of A Civil Action and Refuge, a harrowing story of a body and a place--the New Jersey boglands, one of the most contaminated regions of the... country. This is an American story. Two immigrant families drawn together from wildly different parts of the world, Italy on one side and Barbados on the other, pursued their vision of the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey, where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries on hot afternoons and spent lazy days rowing dinghies down creeks. But the gooseberry patch was near a nuclear power plant that released record levels of radiation, and the creeks were invisibly ruined by illegally dumped toxic waste. One by one, family members found their bodies mirroring the compromised landscape of the Barrens: infertile and damaged by inexplicable growths. Soon the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for radiation. Body Toxic is an environmental memoir--merging the personal and familial with the political and environmental. Intensely intimate and starkly contemporary, it is a story of bravery and resignation, of great hope and great loss. This beautifully composed book presents American families in the midst of the wreckage of the American dream."[An] arresting memoir of a New Jersey girlhood lived in the shadows of the twentieth century's most sinister molecules: the DDT, tritium, chloradane, benzene, and plutonium that are now part of the American landscape...Antonetta's considerable achievement in Body Toxic is to devise a literary voice for the people who live in such places...What Antonetta has written is something new--a postpsychological memoir...By the end of this dark, disturbing book, you realize Antonetta has posed a challenge to our prevailing notions of science and journalism and even literary narrative. " Michael Pollan, New York Times Book Review"Bittersweet and spiked with startlingly poetic descriptions...[It] opens a new chapter in the literature of place and offers a fresh and poignant look at the old story of inheritance."Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

In this ground-breaking study, Margo Maine declares war on a culture that dismisses, devalues, and disempowers women by making them hate their own... bodies. This book covers issues from dieting and weight prejudice to concepts of beauty and ageism to sports, fashion advertising, and propaganda. With practical strategies for activists, educators, and parents, this book also contains extensive references and appendices. Body Wars takes its place alongside The Beauty Myth and Reviving Ophelia in recognizing the constant assault women face, but goes further by giving them practical tools with which to fight back.

Today women are lifting weights to build muscle, wrapping their bodies in seaweed to reduce unwanted water retention, attending weigh-ins at diet... centers, and devoting themselves to many other types of "body work." Filled with the voices of real women, this book unravels the complicated emotional and intellectual motivations that drive them as they confront American culture's unreachable beauty ideals. This powerful feminist study lucidly and compellingly argues against the idea that the popularity of body work means that women are enslaved to a male-fashioned "beauty myth." Essential reading for understanding current debates on beauty, Body Work demonstrates that women actually use body work to escape that beauty myth. Debra Gimlin focuses on four sites where she conducted in-depth research--a beauty salon, aerobics classes, a plastic surgery clinic, and a social and political organization for overweight women. The honest and provocative interviews included in this book uncover these women's feelings about their bodies, their reasons for attempting to change or come to terms with them, and the reactions of others in their lives. These interviews show that women are redefining their identities through their participation in body work, that they are working on their self-images as much as on their bodies. Plastic surgery, for example, ultimately is an empowering life experience for many women who choose it, while hairstyling becomes an arena for laying claim to professional and social class identities. This book develops a convincing picture of how women use body work to negotiate the relationship between body and self, a process that inevitably involves coming to terms with our bodies' deviation from cultural ideals. One of the few studies that includes empirical evidence of women's own interpretations of body work, this important project is also based firmly in cultural studies, symbolic interactionism, and feminism. With this book, Debra Gimlin adds her voice to those of scholars who are now looking beyond the surface of the beauty myth to the complex reality of women's lives.

From the astonishing imagination of Dash Shaw, visionary author of Bottomless Belly Button, comes a darkly fantastical graphic novel about a small town,... a lowlife botanist, and a mysterious plant with strange powers. It’s 2060, and a devastating civil war has left the country in shambles. Professor Paulie Panther–botanist, writer, and hopeless romantic–arrives in the experimental forest town of Boney Borough to research a strange plant growing behind the high school. As he conducts his research, he befriends some of the local residents: Miss Jem, the alluring science teacher; Billy Borg, Boney Borough’s star athlete; and Pearl Peach, the rebellious schoolgirl. Paulie soon discovers that the plant, when smoked, imparts telepathic powers. But when he shares this remarkable drug with his new friends, he finds that they’re not interested in mind-expansion. In fact, it appears that Paulie’s brash individualism might not be at all welcome in a town that prefers conformity to eccentricity. Nominated for a 2009 Eisner Award and with a bold, innovative design, BodyWorld is a mind-blowing blend of science-fiction, classic high school drama, and futuristic what-if. It is at once funny and fearless–and sure to be the graphic novel event of the year.

The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1899 gave the British, as Kipling said, 'no end of a lesson'. It proved to be the longest, the costliest,... the bloodiest and the most humiliating campaign that Britain fought between 1815 and 1914. Thomas Pakenham has written the first full-scale history of the war since 1910. His narrative is based on first-hand and largely unpublished sources ranging from the private papers of the leading protagonists to the recollections of survivors from both sides. Out of this historical gold-mine, the author has constructed a narrative as vivid and fast-moving as a novel, and a history that in scholarship, breadth and impact will endure for many years.

"Students of Boethius and of medieval logic will . . . profit from Stump's work on this difficult treatise. Her translation, . . . the first into... English . . . and the interpretative essays, e.g., on dialectic and Aristotle's Topics, Peter of Spain, and the Porphyrian Tree, are useful and informative."-Library Journal