Download or read book Welcome to Cancerland My Humorously Toxic Journey written by Ritch Gaiti and published by Sedona Editions. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Think of it this way," my Thoracic Surgeon explained. "The right lung is divided into three sections, called lobes. Each is about the size of a folded up slice of pizza." He saw the curious look on my face. "Regular, not Sicilian," he clarified. "It's very hard to fold Sicilian slices." I nodded; clearly he had been trained well. * * * Doc P, my Pulmonologist, studied the computer screen. This could not be a good sign. Of course, just having a Pulmonologist is not a good sign. If I had a list of Things I Don't Want to Have, Pulmonologist would be near the top, way ahead of Periodontist and a notch behind Criminal Lawyer. Of course, I wouldn't want to have to have a Parole Officer, a Bankruptcy Attorney or Shingles either. * * * I had never given much thought to the nature of my demise, should that ever occur. However, if I had conjured up a list of potential causes, cancer would not have even been considered for consideration. However, if it had appeared on my list as one of my potential executioners d' jour, it would have been in the quest of completeness, not because I considered it within the realm of possibility. And, certainly it would have fallen to the very bottom, right after being eaten by sharks in my basement. To be clear, I have never had sharks or any other predatory fish in my basement, except for Attila, my kosher goldfish. Moreover, I live over forty miles from the ocean and there is no way that a shark could get to my house - and if it did, it is unlikely that it could open the basement door. The prevailing logic notwithstanding, I opted for shark-proofing my house as part of the termite guarantee. To wit, I had a slightly greater chance of being attacked by sharks in my basement than getting cancer. I was wrong. An entertaining and informative trip for anyone who has had cancer or plans to never get cancer or just likes to be entertained. **Previously published under the title: Fuck you Cancer ..and the Cell You Rode In On

Download or read book Fuck You Cancer and the Cell You Rode in On Humorously Toxic written by Ritch Gaiti and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Think of it this way," my Thoracic Surgeon explained. "The right lung is divided into three sections, called lobes. Each is about the size of a folded up slice of pizza."He saw the curious look on my face."Regular, not Sicilian," he clarified. "It's very hard to fold Sicilian slices."I nodded; clearly he had been trained well.* * *Doc P, my Pulmonologist, studied the computer screen. This could not be a good sign. Of course, just having a Pulmonologist is not a good sign. If I had a list of Things I Don't Want to Have, Pulmonologist would be near the top, way ahead of Periodontist and a notch behind Criminal Lawyer. Of course, I wouldn't want to have to have a Parole Officer, a Bankruptcy Attorney or Shingles either. * * *I had never given much thought to the nature of my demise, should that ever occur. However, if I had conjured up a list of potential causes, cancer would not have even been considered for consideration. However, if it had appeared on my list as one of my potential executioners d' jour, it would have been in the quest of completeness, not because I considered it within the realm of possibility. And, certainly it would have fallen to the very bottom, right after being eaten by sharks in my basement.To be clear, I have never had sharks or any other predatory fish in my basement, except for Attila, my kosher goldfish. Moreover, I live over forty miles from the ocean and there is no way that a shark could get to my house - and if it did, it is unlikely that it could open the basement door. The prevailing logic notwithstanding, I opted for shark-proofing my house as part of the termite guarantee. To wit, I had a slightly greater chance of being attacked by sharks in my basement than getting cancer. I was wrong. An entertaining and informative trip for anyone who has had cancer or plans to never get cancer or just likes to be entertained.**Also published under the title: "Welcome to Cancerland" for folks who prefer a less toxic title: ).

Download or read book The Emperor of All Maladies written by Siddhartha Mukherjee and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Download or read book Natural Causes written by Barbara Ehrenreich and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We tend to believe we have agency over our bodies, our minds and even our deaths. Yet emerging science challenges our assumptions of mastery: at the microscopic level, the cells in our bodies facilitate tumours and attack other cells, with life-threatening consequences. In this revelatory book, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that our bodies are a battleground over which we have little control, and lays bare the cultural charades that shield us from this knowledge. Challenging everything we think we know about life and death, she also offers hope - that we find our place in a natural world teeming with animation and endless possibility.

Download or read book The Promise of Happiness written by Sara Ahmed and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

Download or read book Conscious Uncoupling written by Katherine Woodward Thomas and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: And Then They Lived Happily… We enter our romantic relationships with great love, hope, and excitement--we've found the 'one', so we plan and forge our futures together. But sometimes, for many different reasons, relationships come undone; they don't work out. Commonly, we view this as a personal failure, rather than an opportunity. And instead of honoring what we once meant to each other, we hoard bitterness and anger, stewing in shame and resentment. Sometimes even lashing out in destructive and hurtful ways, despite the fact that we’re good people at heart. That's natural: we're almost biologically primed to respond this way. Yet there is another path to the end of a relationship--one filled with mutual respect, kindness, and deep caring. Katherine Woodward Thomas's groundbreaking method, Conscious Uncoupling, provides the valuable skills and tools for you to travel this challenging terrain with these five thoughtful and thought-provoking steps: Step 1: Find Emotional Freedom Step 2: Reclaim Your Power and Your Life Step 3: Break the Pattern, Heal Your Heart Step 4: Become a Love Alchemist Step 5: Create Your Happy Even After Life This paradigm-shifting guide will steer you away from a bitter end and toward a new life that’s empowered and flourishing.

Download or read book Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person written by Miriam Engelberg and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2006-04-25 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: a cartoonist examines her experience with breast cancer in an irreverent and humorous graphic memoir.

Download or read book Dancing in the Streets written by Barbara Ehrenreich and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2007-12-26 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation

Download or read book Mammographies written by Mary K. DeShazer and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-05-09 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction. Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.

Download or read book Crisis scapes written by Jaya Brekke and published by The City at a Time of Crisis. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four years and four days. The exact amount of time, that is, that has lapsed since the day the greek state would sign its ‘memorandum of agreement’ with its lenders (the IMF, the EU and the ECB), on May 5, 2010—officially making its own way into the era of global austerity and crisis. An entering that would come with a bang, and very much stay so: from that moment on, the social tension playing out at the greek territory would feature—constantly, it seems—in discussions, analyses and reports the world over. But what is life like in a city that finds itself in the eye of the crisisstorm, how does the everyday reality here compare to Athens’ global media portrait? What kind of lessons might our city be able to learn from the outbreaks of capitalism’s crises elsewhere, and what lessons might the Athenian example be able to offer, in return? The volume that you hold in your hands acts as an accompaniment to a conference that tried to answer some of these questions. ‘Crisis-scapes: Athens and beyond’ took place in the city of Athens on May 9&10, 2014. Over the two days, the conference tried to explore an array of the facets of the crisis in the city, divided between five axes/panels, which are in turn mirrored in the structure of this book: 1. Flows, infrastructures and networks, 2. Mapping spaces of racist violence, 3. Between invisibility and precarity, 4. The right to the city in crisis and 5. Devaluing labour, depreciating land. Five broad axes comprising the vehicles we used to perambulate through the dark landscapes of the crisis. A crisis neither commencing nor ending here, today. Through these conceptual vehicles taking us through Athens, through her spaces and her times, we focused on the particularities of the greek crisis; a crisis first of all concerning the structures, meanings and processes weaving together what we could broadly label as the greek everyday reality. Yet we also believe these particularities ought to be understood within the global financial crisis framework: hence this centrifugal “beyond”. Athens may now be in a position to offer explanations about phenomena taking place much beyond the city’s strict geographical limits. What renders the city a field of experimentation are trials and productions of new means of governance. And they acquire a new meaning when seen as wider tendencies in crisis management. Yet these Athenian testing grounds must at the same time be studied as traces and as future projections of structural readjustments taking place in seemingly disparate locations, but often-times ever so close in their causes and consequences alike. The interventions put together in the present volume try to take another composite look at Athens and its crisis. They try to comprehend the city through crossings and transitions in space and in time.

Download or read book Transplantation Gothic written by Sara Wasson and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transplantation Gothic is a shadow cultural history of transplantation, as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth-century to the present. The works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.

Download or read book Talking Bodies Vol II written by Bodie A. Ashton and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-07 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together scholars from across disciplines and continents in order to continue to analyse, query, and deconstruct the complexities of bodily existence in the modern world. Comprising nine essays by leading and emerging scholars, and spanning issues ranging from literature, history, sociology, medicine, law and justice and beyond, Talking Bodies vol. II is a timely and prescient addition to the vital discussion of what bodies are, how we perceive them, and what they mean. As the essays of this volume demonstrate, it is imperative to question numerous established presumptions about both the manner by which our bodies perform their identities, and the processes by which their ownership can be impinged upon.

Download or read book Governing the Female Body written by Lori Reed and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A feminist and Foucauldian analysis of a variety of emerging gendered discourses.

Download or read book Avoiding Cancer One Day at a Time written by Lynne Eldridge and published by Avoiding Cancer Now. This book was released on 2006-12 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mortality rate from cancer hasn't changed in 60 years despite the billions invested to find a cure. Avoiding Cancer One Day At A Time provides solid, practical advice for preventing cancer by avoiding carcinogens and implementing lifestyle/dietary practices that modify cancer causing factors. Combining their experience in family medicine and epidemiology with their passion for disease prevention, the authors provide the most up to date and effective advice for preventing cancer from developing in ourselves and our loved ones. Many ?how to? examples for preventing cancer by being environmentally aware, avoiding infections, living the proper lifestyle and getting the proper nutrition are provided. Chapter by chapter summaries and listings of the latest cancer prevention web sites are great references. Worksheets assist readers in implementing the advice in very tangible ways, and the recipe collection of cancer avoiding meals is a winner!

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies written by Frederick Luis Aldama and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comic book studies has developed as a solid academic discipline, becoming an increasingly vibrant field in the United States and globally. A growing number of dissertations, monographs, and edited books publish every year on the subject, while world comics represent the fastest-growing sector of publishing. The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies looks at the field systematically, examining the history and evolution of the genre from a global perspective. This includes a discussion of how comic books are built out of shared aesthetic systems such as literature, painting, drawing, photography, and film. The Handbook brings together readable, jargon-free essays written by established and emerging scholars from diverse geographic, institutional, gender, and national backgrounds. In particular, it explores how the term "global comics" has been defined, as well the major movements and trends that will drive the field in the years to come. Each essay will help readers understand comic books as a storytelling form grown within specific communities, and will also show how these forms exist within what can be considered a world system of comics.

Download or read book Dutching the Book written by Ritch Gaiti and published by Sedona Editions. This book was released on 2012-02-04 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dutching the Book is an American epic about the tests of friendship and family over several decades and a one man's quest to be the best horseplayer in the game. Based on real people and events over several decades, it is a tribute to those who really lived it. Late 1930's Brooklyn, the Great Depression had almost gone. In high school, Ben Collesano had a can't-lose scheme and he didn't--until the racetrack shut him down. Now, over twenty years later, a fireman, he would be tested against the best. But this time he could lose everything as he takes on bookies to save his family and, on the journey, finds himself. DUTCHING THE BOOK is about the tests of lifelong friendship, family, gambling, horse racing, betting capers and a man's quest to pursue a dream. It is about four friends, as different as friends could be; yet bound together by a loyalty that endured through decades, until it was broken.

Download or read book A Darker Ribbon written by Ellen Leopold and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2000-10-17 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first cultural history of breast cancer, this book examines the social attitudes and medical treatments that together defined the modern relationship between women with the disease and their doctors. At the heart of the book are two unpublished correspondences-one between Barbara Mueller, a woman diagnosed with breast cancer eighty years ago, and her surgeon, William Steward Halsted, father of the radical mastectomy, and the other between Rachel Carson, who was writing Silent Spring as she was battling breast cancer, and her personal physician George Crile, Jr.