Download or read book Death in Living Gray written by John Clayton and published by Bitingduck Press LLC. This book was released on 2006-06 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prudence Abernathy left her job in a California art gallery to marry a young army captain on the way home from Vietnam. She settled into the life of a country housewife at the old family plantation in Mason County, VirginiaOCothat is, until her husband is disbarred from practicing law. Prudence has to pitch in to keep the family finances afloat, first by selling off antiques from the manor house, and then by welding funky furniture out of cast-off farm machineryOCothe big stuff like tractors and combines. SheOCOs making do, selling the furniture mostly to the commuters who are moving into the northern end of the county from the Washington, DC., area. Then, one of her heavy tractor sofas crashes through the parlor floor of the Abernathy manor house, causing part of the chimney facing to disintegrate. The collapse exposes the secret compartment in the wall next to the fireplace, allowing a skeleton in a Confederate LieutenantOCOs uniform to fall out. While dusting for prints in the compartment, the police forensic team also finds an expensive bracelet that was stolen the previous year from a retired Yankee businessman, J. Augustus Pickerill. ItOCOs possible that the person in Confederate uniform was involved in the theft during the Confederate Memorial Day Ball that Mr. Pickerill hosted during the previous May, and hid there after he was mortally wounded by an accomplice who didnOCOt want to share the loot. But it is also possible that the theft was done before the ball, while the Pickerills were out of the country on vacation. Unfortunately, Prudence was making some tractor furniture in Mr. PickerillOCOs rec room during the vacation period. That gave her the opportunity to steal the jewelry. The local sheriff also decides that she had the means, since the safe containing the jewelry was opened with a welderOCOs cutting torch, and the motive, since the Abernathys are chronically broke. Aided by her friends and her status as an almost-local after living in the county for thirty years, she sets out to prove her innocence. As she works her way down the list of possible suspects, she comes into sometimes-amusing contact with many of the citizens of Mason County, who, when not answering PrudenceOCOs questions, are busy trying to navigate their lives between the rural Old South and the encroaching suburbia spreading its technocrat tentacles out from the big city. A reading sample, author bio, and picture can be found at bosonbooks.com."
Download or read book Into the Gray Zone written by Adrian Owen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From renowned neuroscientist Adrian Owen comes a thrilling, heartbreaking tale of discovery in one of the least-understood scientific frontiers: the twilight region between full consciousness and brain death. People who inhabit this middle region called the 'gray zone' have sustained traumatic brain injuries or are the victims of stroke or degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Many are oblivious to the outside world, and their doctors and families often believe they're incapable of thought. But a sizable number of patients--as many as twenty percent--are experiencing something different: intact minds adrift within damaged brains and bodies. In 2006, Adrian Owen led a team that discovered this lost population and made medical history, provoking an ongoing debate among scientists, physicians, and philosophers about the meaning, value, and purpose of life. In Into the Gray Zone, we follow Owen as he pushes forward the boundaries of science, using a variety of sophisticated brain scans, auditory prompts, and even Alfred Hitchcock film clips to not only 'find' patients who are trapped inside their heads but to actually communicate with them and elicit answers to moving questions, such as 'Are you in pain?' and 'Do you want to go on living?' and 'Are you happy?' (Many gray zone patients do, in fact, claim to be satisfied with their quality of life.) Into the Gray Zone shines a fascinating light on how we think, remember, and pay attention. And it shows us how the field of brain-computer interfaces is about to explode, radically changing prognoses for people with impaired brain function and creating, for all of us, the tantalizing possibility of telepathy and augmented intelligence. Ultimately; this is not just a spellbinding story of scientific discovery but a deeply human, affirming book that causes us to wonder anew at the indomitable bonds of love."--Jacket.
Download or read book Code Gray written by Farzon A Nahvi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Code Gray is a “provocative and meaningful” (Theresa Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Healing) narrative-driven medical memoir that places you directly in the crucible of urgent life-or-death decision-making, offering insights that can help us cope at a time when the world around us appears to be falling apart. In the tradition of books by such bestselling physician-authors as Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Danielle Ofri, this beautifully written memoir by an emergency room doctor revolves around one of his routine shifts at an urban ER. Intimately narrated as it follows the experiences of real patients, it is filled with fascinating, adrenaline-pumping scenes of rescues and deaths, and the critical, often excruciating follow-through in caring for patients’ families. Centered on the riveting story of a seemingly healthy forty-three-year-old woman who arrives in the ER in sudden cardiac arrest, Code Gray weaves in stories that explore everything from the early days of the Covid outbreak to the perennial glaring inequities of our healthcare system. It offers an unforgettable, “discomfiting, and often bracing” (Bloomberg Businessweek) portrait of challenges so profound, powerful, and extreme that normal ethical and medical frameworks prove inadequate. By inviting you to experience what it is like to shift in the ER from a physician’s perspective, we are forced to test our beliefs and principles. Often, there are no clear answers to these challenges posed in the ER. You are left feeling unsettled, but through this process, we can appreciate just how complicated, emotional, unpredictable—and yet strikingly beautiful—life can be.
Download or read book Love Unleashes Life written by Stephanie Gray and published by . This book was released on 2016-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes written by Dan Egan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award "Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.… Egan’s book is bursting with life (and yes, death)." —Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.
Download or read book Poor Things written by Alasdair Gray and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Alasdair Gray's most brilliant creations, Poor Things is a postmodern revision of Frankenstein that replaces the traditional monster with Bella Baxter--a beautiful young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of an infant. Godwin Baxter's scientific ambition to create the perfect companion is realized when he finds the drowned body of Bella, but his dream is thwarted by Dr. Archibald McCandless's jealous love for Baxter's creation.The hilarious tale of love and scandal that ensues would be "the whole story" in the hands of a lesser author (which in fact it is, for this account is actually written by Dr. McCandless). For Gray, though, this is only half the story, after which Bella (a.k.a. Victoria McCandless) has her own say in the matter.Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, Poor Things is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking duel between the desires of men and the independence of women, from one of Scotland's most accomplished authors.
Download or read book Godforsaken Idaho written by Shawn Vestal and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nine stories illuminate what it means to be Mormon and how faith serves to humanize, in a work that includes a seriocomic portrait of a young Joseph Smith.
Download or read book After written by Bruce Greyson, M.D. and published by St. Martin's Essentials. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's leading expert on near-death experiences reveals his journey toward rethinking the nature of death, life, and the continuity of consciousness. Cases of remarkable experiences on the threshold of death have been reported since ancient times, and are described today by 10% of people whose hearts stop. The medical world has generally ignored these “near-death experiences,” dismissing them as “tricks of the brain” or wishful thinking. But after his patients started describing events that he could not just sweep under the rug, Dr. Bruce Greyson began to investigate. As a physician without a religious belief system, he approached near-death experiences from a scientific perspective. In After, he shares the transformative lessons he has learned over four decades of research. Our culture has tended to view dying as the end of our consciousness, the end of our existence—a dreaded prospect that for many people evokes fear and anxiety. But Dr. Greyson shows how scientific revelations about the dying process can support an alternative theory. Dying could be the threshold between one form of consciousness and another, not an ending but a transition. This new perspective on the nature of death can transform the fear of dying that pervades our culture into a healthy view of it as one more milestone in the course of our lives. After challenges us to open our minds to these experiences and to what they can teach us, and in so doing, expand our understanding of consciousness and of what it means to be human.
Download or read book The Immortalization Commission written by John Gray and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great philosopher will change the way you think about your life. For most of human history, religion provided a clear explanation of life and death. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries new ideas — from psychiatry to evolution to Communist — seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. We would ourselves become God. This is the theme of a remarkable new book by one of the world's greatest lving philosophers. It is a brilliant and frightening look at the problems and opportunities of a world coming to grips with humankind's now solitary, unaided place in the universe. Gray takes two major examples: the belief that the science-backed Communism of the new USSR could reshape the planet, and the belief among a group of Edwardian intellectuals — popularized through mediums and automatic writing — that there was a non-religious form of life after death. Gray presents an extraordinary cast of philosophers, journalists, politicians, charlatans and mass murderers, all of whom felt driven by a specifically scientific and modern world view. He raises a host of fascinating questions about what it means to be human. The implications of Gray's book will haunt its readers for the rest of their lives.
Download or read book Pathfinder Adventure Night of the Gray Death P2 written by RON. LUNDEEN and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galt's executioners are the masked and mysterious Gray Gardeners. Held above the laws of the chaotic nation, these grim killers soak the revolution-wracked land in dread and blood. They behead the guilty and innocent alike with their magical guillotines, but few possess the courage to stand against them. Powerful heroes must infiltrate the Gray Gardeners and put an end to their reign of terror. As the heroes race from haunted crypts to the elegant opulence of an ill-fated masque, the midnight chime will bring salvation or doom to a nation. Night of the Gray Death is a deluxe adventure in Gothic horror for 16th-level characters written by Ron Lundeen. It exposes the secrets of the Gray Gardeners with new monsters, new magic items, and new challenges to test the mightiest heroes. Mysteries and intrigue abound during the Night of the Gray Death!
Download or read book The Fountains of Youth written by Brian Stableford and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a science fiction novel of enormous scope and ambition, filled with wonders that expands Brian Stableford's on-going future history series. Hundreds of years in the future, further ahead than the settings of Inherit the Earth and Architects of Emortality, Mortimer Gray is born into a world where he can potentially live forever. But after a traumatic natural disaster that kills millions, Gray devotes the next five hundred years of his life to the study of death and its effects on human civilization, viewed from a post-death perspective. Through it all we see the broad, large-scale accumulation of change and the growth of humanity on Earth and out to the stars as Gray experiences his boundless lifetime. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Let s Talk about Death over Dinner written by Michael Hebb and published by Da Capo Lifelong Books. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air, the acclaimed founder of Death over Dinner offers a practical, inspiring guide to life's most difficult yet important conversation. Of the many critical conversations we will all have throughout our lifetime, few are as important as the ones discussing death—and not just the practical considerations, such as DNRs and wills, but what we fear, what we hope, and how we want to be remembered. Yet few of these conversations are actually happening. Inspired by his experience with his own father and countless stories from others who regret not having these conversations, Michael Hebb cofounded Death Over Dinner—an organization that encourages people to pull up a chair, break bread, and really talk about the one thing we all have in common. Death Over Dinner has been one of the most effective end-of-life awareness campaigns to date; in just three years, it has provided the framework and inspiration for more than a hundred thousand dinners focused on having these end-of-life conversations. As Arianna Huffington said, "We are such a fast-food culture, I love the idea of making the dinner last for hours. These are the conversations that will help us to evolve." Let's Talk About Death (over Dinner) offers keen practical advice on how to have these same conversations—not just at the dinner table, but anywhere. There's no one right way to talk about death, but Hebb shares time—and dinner—tested prompts to use as conversation starters, ranging from the spiritual to the practical, from analytical to downright funny and surprising. By transforming the most difficult conversations into an opportunity, they become celebratory and meaningful—ways that not only can change the way we die, but the way we live.
Download or read book The Cold Vanish written by Jon Billman and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Perfect for readers of Jon Krakauer and Douglas Preston, this "authentic and encyclopedic" book examines real-life cases of those who vanish in the wilderness without a trace (Roman Dial)—and those eccentric, determined characters who try to find them. These are the stories that defy conventional logic. The proverbial vanished without a trace incidences, which happen a lot more (and a lot closer to your backyard) than almost anyone thinks. These are the missing whose situations are the hardest on loved ones left behind. The cases that are an embarrassment for park superintendents, rangers and law enforcement charged with Search & Rescue. The ones that baffle the volunteers who comb the mountains, woods and badlands. The stories that should give you pause every time you venture outdoors. Through Jacob Gray's disappearance in Olympic National Park, and his father Randy Gray who left his life to search for him, we will learn about what happens when someone goes missing. Braided around the core will be the stories of the characters who fill the vacuum created by a vanished human being. We'll meet eccentric bloodhound-handler Duff and R.C., his flagship purebred, who began trailing with the family dog after his brother vanished in the San Gabriel Mountains. And there's Michael Neiger North America's foremost backcountry Search & Rescue expert and self-described "bushman" obsessed with missing persons. And top researcher of persons missing on public wildlands Ex-San Jose, California detective David Paulides who is also one of the world's foremost Bigfoot researchers. It's a tricky thing to write about missing persons because the story is the absence of someone. A void. The person at the heart of the story is thinner than a smoke ring, invisible as someone else's memory. The bones you dig up are most often metaphorical. While much of the book will embrace memory and faulty memory—history—The Cold Vanish is at its core a story of now and tomorrow. Someone will vanish in the wild tomorrow. These are the people who will go looking.
Download or read book Grief Is the Thing with Feathers written by Max Porter and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar--a man adrift in the wake of his wife's sudden, accidental death. And there are his two sons who like him struggle in their London apartment to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. The father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness, while the boys wander, savage and unsupervised. In this moment of violent despair they are visited by Crow--antagonist, trickster, goad, protector, therapist, and babysitter. This self-described "sentimental bird," at once wild and tender, who "finds humans dull except in grief," threatens to stay with the wounded family until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss lessens with the balm of memories, Crow's efforts are rewarded and the little unit of three begins to recover: Dad resumes his book about the poet Ted Hughes; the boys get on with it, grow up. Part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's extraordinary debut combines compassion and bravura style to dazzling effect. Full of angular wit and profound truths, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers is a startlingly original and haunting debut by a significant new talent.
Download or read book And Then the Gray Heaven written by R. E. Katz and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: RE Katz's And Then the Gray Heaven centers on Jules, whose partner B has recently died in a freak accident. Confronting the red tape of the hospital, the dissociation and cruelty of B's family, and the unimaginable void now at the center of their lives, Jules and new friend Theo embark on a road trip to bury two-thirds of B's ashes in the places they most belong. Along the way, Katz delves into their relationship and their life stories--Jules' rise from abandoned baby origins through the Florida foster care system, and B's artistic transformation, surrounded by kindred spirits who helped them realize it was possible to be regarded as a human and not as a body. Delving into what it means to try to be alive to your own pain and the pain of others under late capitalism, And Then the Gray Heaven explores the themes of queer grief and affection, queer failure, burial as hero's journey, and the grotesqueries of artistic determination within and beyond the institutions that define our lives.
Download or read book Life Interrupted written by Spalding Gray and published by Crown. This book was released on 2005-09-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first decade of the new century was getting underway, Spalding Gray worried that the joy he’d finally found with his wife, stepdaughter, and two sons would fail to fuel his work as a theatrical monologist the way anxiety, conflict, doubt, and various crises once had. Before he got the chance to find out, however, an automobile accident in Ireland left him with the lasting wounds of body and spirit that ultimately led him to take his own life. But as his dear friend novelist Francine Prose notes in this volume’s foreword, “Even when his depression became so severe that he was barely able to hold a simple conversation, he was, miraculously, able to perform.” As was always his method, Gray began to fashion a new monologue in various workshop settings that would tell the story of the accident and its aftermath. Originally titled Black Spot—for what the locals called the section of highway where Gray’s accident occurred—it began as a series of workshops at P.S. 122 in New York City and eventually became Life Interrupted.Gray died in early 2004, and though never completed, Life Interrupted is rich with brave self-revelation, masterfully acute observations of wonderfully peculiar people, penetrating wit and genuine humor, an irresolvable fascination with life and death, and all the other attributes of Gray’s singular and unmistakable voice. In the final performance of Life Interrupted, Gray read two additional pieces: a short story about a day he spent with his son Theo at the carousel in Central Park and a brief, poignant love letter to New York City that he wrote after the terrorist attacks in 2001. This volume includes these pieces as well as many of the eulogies that were delivered by his friends and family at memorial services held at Lincoln Center and in Sag Harbor. [If you had to reduce all of Spalding’s work to its essence, its core, if you wanted to locate the subject to which, no matter what else he talked about, he kept returning, I suppose you could say that his work was a profoundly metaphysical inquiry into how we manage to live despite the knowledge that we are someday going to die. . . . If there is a consolation, it’s what he left behind: the children whom he so loved and, of course, his work. Reading the unfinished pieces in this volume . . . we hear his voice again and feel the happiness we felt when he sat on stage behind his wooden desk, took a sip from his water glass, transformed the raw material of his life into art, and the crowd applauded each brilliant, beautiful sentence.] —Francine Prose, from the Foreword Also available as an eBook
Download or read book The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes A Hunger Games Novel written by Suzanne Collins and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined - every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.
