How do doctors piece together obscure medical clues to make a diagnosis? What happens when the decisions are a matter of life and death? In these twenty-six gripping tales culled from his three decades in medicine, the eminent neurologist Harold Klawans, "the shrewdest medical super-sleuth writing today" (The (London) Sunday Times), reaches to the heart of modern medicine. Here the author of the highly acclaimed Toscanini's Fumble and Newton's Madness recounts how as a terrified resident he once confused the smell of his own nervous sweat with the odor of the patient - which turns out to be the essential clue in the diagnosis. We meet the "Lone Ranger" who becomes a mummy after he's given an experimental drug for schizophrenia; the vice president of a bank who believes that snake venom will cure his Lou Gehrig's disease; a man whose eyes, even while driving, suddenly, spontaneously, close; and an eminent neurologist from Vienna whom Klawans exposes as having been a member of the SS. One of the most chilling stories chronicles the drama of a patient whose family chooses to keep him confined to his wheelchair and refuses him treatment to satisfy their own need for control. Bizarre, disturbing, moving - and always fascinating - these tales show how fine the line is between life and death. Klawans poses such controversial questions as: When is someone considered dead? Should doctors fight to extend a life that cannot be saved? When is prolonging life just prolonging the final agony? We witness how in a race to perform the first heart transplant in Chicago, doctors are ready to pull out the heart of a man thought to be dead but who is only unconscious. We see a desperate father who holdsnurses at gunpoint while he disconnects the life support system for his comatose child. Throughout, Klawans defends the patient's right to decide when, where, and how to die, with the help of help or his physician. Guided by this superb storyteller and gifted and compassionate doctor, we explore the edges of life and death and come closer to the mystery of what it means to be a human being.

72-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident. Plagued by insomnia, he tries to push back thoughts of things he would prefer to forget - his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus - by telling himself stories. He conjures up a parallel world for himself.

"New York City, Spring 1967: Twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Falling into a passionate affair with Margot, Walker soon finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible is told by three different narrators as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island, in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers." -- Publisher description.

A multi-generational novel set over the course of a day, The Other Side centers on the journey of Vincent and Ellen MacNamara. Married for sixty-six years, the two have seen their share of hardships: emigration from Ireland to America; the bitter disappointments handed down to their children and grandchildren; and, most recently, setbacks to their health. In The Other Side, Vincent returns from a period of convalescence in a nursing home after Ellen, disoriented from a stroke, had pushed him to the ground, injuring him. As family members assemble, the incident becomes a nexus for the anger, anguish and misunderstandings that have simmered for decades.

It's the late sixties, the last dark years of Franco's dictatorship: Minaya, a university student in Madrid, is caught up in the student protests and the police are after him. He moves to his uncle Manuel's country estate in the small town of Mágina to write his thesis on an old friend of Manuel's, an obscure republican poet named Jacinto Solana.

The country house is full of traces of the poet--notes, photographs, journals--and Minaya soon discovers that, thirty years earlier, during the Spanish Civil War, both his uncle and Solana were in love with the same woman, the beautiful, unsettling Mariana. Engaged to Manuel, she was shot in the attic of the house on her wedding night. With the aid of Inés, a maid, Minaya begins to search for Solana's lost masterpiece, a novel called Beatus Ille. Looking for a book, he unravels a crime.

Louise Erdrich's brilliant novels of contemporary Native American and Midwestern life have brought her legions of fans and great critical acclaim. Here, in her latest and most luminescent work in the series begun with Love Medicine, the central character is Lipsha Morrissey, the illegitimate son of June Kashpaw and Gerry Nanapush. Lipsha brings together in his birth, rearing, and inheritance all of the major families from Erdrich's previous books, and, of course, represents the future. At a crossroads in his life, Lipsha is summoned by his grandmother. He returns to the reservation and falls in love for the first time. But the object of his newfound obssesive desire, the beautiful and charismatic Shawnee Ray, is in the midst of deciding whether to marry Kipsha's boss, the wealthy reservation entrepreneur Lyman Lamartine. Lipsha is determined to win Shawnee Ray's love and begins with a modern approach - he asks her out for Chinese food. When their evening goes hopelessly, absurdly awry, he decides to try a more traditional method and goes to see his great grandmother, Fleur Pillager, a tribeswoman of a powerful ancient family, to ask for a Love Medicine. After following Fleur to her home in the remote woods, he realizes that this sacred and cherished ground is the exact spot that Lyman and others with aggressive business interests have chosen to open their federally sanctioned bingo palace. As is the case on so many reservations today, Lipsha finds himself torn between success and meaning, love and money, the future and the past. A novel of spiritual depth, lyrical prose, and wild hope, The Bingo Palace explores the implications of the mystical element of chance in contemporary life andis sure to please all of Louise Erdrich's ardent fans as well as attract many new readers.

This extraordinary memoir takes in 3 generations of Margaret Forster's family, beginning with her grandmother, who took to her grave the secrets of the first 23 years of her life. It also acts as a commentary on how women's lives have changed.

With the publication of Open Heart, internationally acclaimed Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua has written a psychological tour de force that takes as its subject nothing less than love and the nature of man's soul. From the opening lines of this first-person narrative, the reader is propelled into the mind of Dr. Benjamin Rubin, an ambitious young internist, who is jockeying for position with the hospital's top surgeons. But it isn't until Benjy learns that his internship has been terminated, and that he has been selected to accompany the hospital administrator and his wife to India to retrieve their ailing daughter, that Yehoshua sets his hero on a journey of self-discovery. This journey brings the supremely rational, coolheaded physician to surrender all his deeply held beliefs when his experience in India awakens an erotic passion that dares to destroy his tidy world as he pursues the illicit love of the administrator's wife.

Across the country, families are being torn apart and people sent to prison, all because of a trendy new psychological phenomenon: recovered memory. According to many clinical psychologists, when the mind is forced to endure a horrifying experience, it has the ability to bury the entire memory of it so deeply within the unconscious that it can only be recalled in the form of a flashback triggered by a sight, a smell, or a sound. Therapists and lawyers have created an industry based on treating and litigating the cases of people who suddenly claim to have "recovered" memories of everything from child abuse to murder.
Dr. Loftus reveals that despite decades of research, there is absolutely no controlled scientific support for the idea that memories of trauma are routinely banished into the unconscious and then reliably recovered years later.

Adviezen aan vrouwen om het type man te vinden dat bij hen past.

What system of morals should rational people select as the best for society? Using a contemporary psychological theory of action and of motivation, Richard Brandt's Oxford lectures argue that the purpose of living should be to strive for the greatest good for the largest number of people. Brandt's discussions range from the concept of welfare to conflict between utilitarian moral codes and the dictates of self-interest. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Nothing interesting ever happened in the small, eastern Washington wheat town of Antioch-until now. Without warning, Antioch has suddenly become a gateway for the supernatural-from sightings of angels and messianic images materializing in the sky to a weeping crucifix with the power to heal. Yet these miracles are only the beginning of something much bigger: the return of the Messiah as prophesied in the Bible. Then a self-proclaimed porphet mysteriously appears at a local ranch with a message...but is it from God? In search of answers and hungry for miracles, the national media-along with the curious-flock in droves to the all-but-forgotten town. But what's great for local business has just the opposite effect on Travis Jordan. The burned-out-former pastor has been trying to hide his past in Antioch. Now the whole world is headed to his backyard to find the Messiah, and in the process, every spiritual assumption he has ever held will be challenged. The startling secret behind this visitation ultimately pushes one man into a supernatural confrontation that will forever alter the lives of everyone involved.

Traces the relationship between a team of JP Morgan banking gurus and the current financial crisis, documenting their invention of a bold variety of allegedly risk-free investments that sparked a frenzy in the banking world and may have directly contributed to the market crash.

Verslag van de Duitse schrijver (1749-1832) van zijn verblijf in Italië in de periode 1786-1788 en de invloed daarvan op zijn persoon en kunstenaarschap.

"I paint myself, and so I paint the whole of mankind." So says this Dutch artist, who has painted nothing but self-portraits since 1981. This 720-page volume includes all 2,314 of the artist's works to date.

'A glittering stream of revelatory light . . . Fascinating' THE TIMES'Rich, complex and original' TOM HOLLAND'One of the best books on Blake I have ever read' DAVID KEENAN'Absolutely wonderful!' TERRY GILLIAM'An alchemical dream of a book' SALENA GODDEN'Tells us a great deal about all human imagination' ROBIN INCE***Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. His life passed without recognition and he worked without reward, mocked, dismissed and misinterpreted. Yet from his ignoble end in a pauper's grave, Blake now occupies a unique position as an artist who unites and attracts people from all corners of society, and a rare inclusive symbol of English identity. Blake famously experienced visions, and it is these that shaped his attitude to politics, sex, religion, society and art. Thanks to the work of neuroscientists and psychologists, we are now in a better position to understand what was happening inside that remarkable mind, and gain a deeper appreciation of his brilliance. His timeless work, we will find, has never been more relevant.In William Blake vs the World we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context. And although the journey begins with us trying to understand him, we will ultimately discover that it is Blake who helps us to understand ourselves.

This essential collection, the first of its kind, draws together twenty-six stories by vital women writers. Here are stories written by the famous and by those whose names are less well known; recluses and extroverts; the rich and the impoverished; novelists and poets; heterosexuals, bisexuals, and lesbians. Many were American and English expatriates caught up in the artistic revolt of Paris between 1890 and 1940; others, who ventured forth in imagination only, drew on its innovative spirit. Many refuted traditional concepts of gender and sexuality; all challenged restrictive definitions of femininity. Colette, H. D., Susan Glaspell, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, Anais Nin, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, and May Sinclair number among this period's host of accomplished women writers. A woman becomes obsessed by a life-size doll and rescues the memory of its original model from neglect; another keeps an array of Parisian gowns under lock and key rather than join the masquerade of fashion; two housewives use their attention to domestic detail to detect--and shield--a murderer. Here are writers who cast aside conventions. Rebellious, talented, provocative, they parade their tales of those who take life on their own terms--you know, that kind of woman.

In the past, slipcasting was primarily considered an industrial method. Today, however, ceramic artists are adapting its techniques to create a wide range of beautiful and highly individualised pieces. This guide explains and demonstrates the techniques involved and shows how they can be adapted for the studio workshop. It uses the work of an international group of artists to illustrate the breadth and versatility of the work that can be created with slipcasting.

From the dawn of time, power has been an aphrodisiac. The royal mistress, having conquered a king, often ran his kingdom, wielding her sexuality as a sceptre. This book explores the position of royal mistress at European Courts, and the fascinating women who filled it.

How should we live? That question was no less urgent for English men and women who lived between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries than for this book's readers. Keith Thomas's masterly exploration of the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives in those centuries between the beginning of the Reformation and the heyday of the Enlightenment illuminates the central values of the period, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human existence. Consideration of the origins of the modern ideal of human fulfilment and of obstacles to its realization in the early modern period frames an investigation that ranges from work, wealth, and possessions to the pleasures of friendship, family, and sociability. The cult of military prowess, the pursuit of honour and reputation, the nature of religious belief and scepticism, and the desire to be posthumously remembered are all drawn into the discussion, and the views and practices of ordinary people are measured against the opinions of the leading philosophers and theologians of the time. The Ends of Life offers a fresh approach to the history of early modern England, by one of the foremost historians of our time. It also provides modern readers with much food for thought on the problem of how we should live and what goals in life we should pursue.

Egypt, 1964. The great temple at Abu Simbel must be rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Block by block it is to be dismantled & resurrected 60 metres higher. This most delicate of tasks is overseen by Avery, a young, newly married, engineer.

This cultural history, delving back through the centuries, sets out to answer how sculpture, for so long regarded as a more limited art, has come to take a leading role today? From the Renaissance to the 19th century, sculpture was painting's poor relation. Yet, from the start of the 20th century, sculpture increasingly took centre stage: the Turner Prize is usually won by a sculptor of some form. This book aims to answer the questions: why is this, and what has happened? Illustrated throughout, containing charaters and bizarre incidents as well as illuminating examples and heated arguments, this work offers a guide to the art of the past and up to the end of the 20th century.

This fascinating history of psychosomatic disorders shows how patients throughout the centuries have produced symptoms in tandem with the cultural shifts of the larger society. Newly popularized diseases such as "chronic fatigue syndrome" and "total allergy syndrome" are only the most recent examples of patients complaining of ailments that express the truths about the culture in which they live.

"A work of subtle insights and of bold illumination, written with persuasive eloquence; it should become a classic in its field."--William Styron

"Will rush to the top of the list of important books on psychohistory . . . balanced and provocative . . . it's a blockbuster."--Carl N. Degler, Stanford University

"An illuminating overview of the prevailing understanding of suicide over the past 300 years, tracing current theories back, in some cases, to their roots in Puritan New England. [Kushner] shows how the conflicting views of psychology, sociology, and biochemistry emerged and hardened into dogmatic theories within each discipline that impeded cross-pollination. . . . Fascinating stuff."--San Diego Tribune

"Outstanding . . . the only work I know that is adequate to the complexity and multidimensionality of suicide, and which genuinely combines, indeed synthesizes, a wide range of disciplinary perspectives into a coherent and satisfying view of the issues. . . . a tour de force."--Joel Kovel, M. D.

De Amerikaanse neuroloog beschrijft, onder meer aan de hand van ervaringsverhalen van patiënten en onderzoeksresultaten, het fenomeen hallucinaties in zijn verschillende verschijningsvormen zoals bij de ziekte van Parkinson, het syndroom van Bonnet, epilepsie, drugsgebruik en een delirium.

150 Geleden werd Sigmund Freud geboren. Dit boek bevat de tekst van 27 lezingen ter gelegenheid daarvan. Vele aspecten komen via 30 wetenschappers aan bod. 

Neurobiologische benadering van de menselijke geest, vooral van de rol van de emoties bij de rationaliteit.

On the South Pacific atoll of Pingelap, Sacks finds that a startlingly high proportion of the population is colour-blind. On Guam, an endemic neurogenerative disease is linked to the island's cycads which form the islanders' staple diet

In dit boek beschrijft de auteur (neuroloog en psychiater) hoe de unieke structuur van vrouwelijke hersenen niet alleen bepaalt hoe vrouwen denken en waar ze waarde aan hechten, maar ook hoe ze communiceren en van wie ze zullen houden. Publicatie is gebaseerd op tientallen jaren onderzoek en aangevuld met feiten en casestudies. Oorspr. titel 'The female brain' (2006).

Ever since Freud first unveiled his theories of female psychology arguments have raged - from his contemporaries' denial of infantile sexuality to the feminist attacks of today. This reader contains Freud's central statements on women, from letters as well as published work. It presents an accessible view of the development of his thought. The introduction and linking commentaries lay out the arguments and relate his ideas to his clinical practice and broader theory. There is also an annotated biography.

Het leven in de vooroorlogse joodse buurten van Amsterdam, beschreven aan de hand van veel interviews.[eerste druk als proefschrift. UvA]