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Author: Todd May
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022644001X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
“His discussion of the ways in which those who try to make themselves invulnerable . . . undermine what makes us most human, is clear and bracing.” —Los Angeles Review of Books In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, Todd May shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity. May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way. Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world.
Author: Todd May
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022644001X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230
Get Book
Book Description
“His discussion of the ways in which those who try to make themselves invulnerable . . . undermine what makes us most human, is clear and bracing.” —Los Angeles Review of Books In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, Todd May shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity. May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way. Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world.
Author: Charlotte Pierce-Baker
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1613741111
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Charlotte Pierce-Baker did everything right when raising her son, providing not only emotional support but the best education possible. At age twenty-five, he was pursuing a postgraduate degree and seemingly in control of his life. She never imagined her high-achieving son would wind up handcuffed, dirty, and in jail. The moving story of an African American family facing the challenge of bipolar disorder, This Fragile Life provides insight into mental disorders as well as family dynamics. Pierce-Baker traces the evolution of her son's illness and, in looking back, realizes she mistook warning signs for typical child and teen behavior. Hospitalizations, calls in the night, alcohol and drug relapses, pleas for money, and continuous disputes, her son's journey was long, arduous, and almost fatal. This Fragile Life weaves a fascinating story of mental illness, race, family, the drive of African Americans to succeed, and a mother's love for her son.
Author: Stephen Westaby
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0465094848
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In gripping prose, one of the world's leading cardiac surgeons lays bare both the wonder and the horror of a life spent a heartbeat away from death When Stephen Westaby witnessed a patient die on the table during open-heart surgery for the first time, he was struck by the quiet, determined way the surgeons walked away. As he soon understood, this detachment is a crucial survival strategy in a profession where death is only a heartbeat away. In Open Heart, Westaby reflects on over 11,000 surgeries, showing us why the procedures have never become routine and will never be. With astonishing compassion, he recounts harrowing and sometimes hopeful stories from his operating room: we meet a pulseless man who lives with an electric heart pump, an expecting mother who refuses surgery unless the doctors let her pregnancy reach full term, and a baby who gets a heart transplant-only to die once it's in place. For readers of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and of Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, Open Heart offers a soul-baring account of a life spent in constant confrontation with death.
Author: Michael Card
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830874232
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Winner of a Chicago Book Clinic Design Award A Fragile Stone explores the dynamic life of the apostle Peter, revisiting well-known passages and revealing unexpected insights. Author Michael Card sketches out Peter's life, showing how the impetuous fisherman of the Gospels was transformed into the pivotal leader of the early church. "The ultimate reason for getting to know Peter," Card explains, "is so together we might better know Jesus. For the story of Peter is the story of Jesus. Perhaps, if you and I do our best, the same will be said of us someday." Peter's life serves as a model for Christian discipleship, offering hope that we likewise can be changed as Jesus calls us to follow him.
Author: Arlette Farge
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674316379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The rich and complex texture of working-class neighborhoods in eighteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in this collage of the experiences of ordinary people--men and women, rich and poor, masters and servants, neighbors and colleagues. Exploring three arenas of conflict and solidarity--the home, the workplace, and the street--Arlette Farge offers the reader an intimate social history, bringing long-dead citizens and vanished social groups back to life with sensitivity and perception.
Author: Mari Ruti
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438427190
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 183
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Book Description
Psychoanalytic perspective on what Western philosophers from Socrates to Foucault have called “the art of living.”
Author: Kate Hewitt
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 1472017102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
You love your best friend. You trust her with your life.
Author: Kerby Rosanes
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593183703
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 97
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Book Description
*A National Bestseller* From the internationally bestselling artist Kerby Rosanes, an extraordinary coloring book celebrating some of the incredible animals and landscapes that are disappearing around the globe Fragile World is a coloring book to savor, exploring fifty-six endangered, vulnerable, and threatened animals and landscapes—from the Tapanuli orangutan to the hawksbill turtle, from Philippine bat caves to the Baltic Sea. The illustrations are intricate, detailed, and unforgettable, both magisterial and whimsical. And the result is a stunning tribute to Mother Nature. Fragile World is a coloring experience that is at once vintage Kerby and unlike any other.
Author: Cynthia Ruchti
Publisher: Abingdon Press
ISBN: 1501837443
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Josiah Chamberlain's life's work revolves around repairing other people's marriages. When his own is threatened by his wife's unexplained distance, and then threatened further when she's unexpectedly plunged into an unending fog, Josiah finds his expertise, quick wit and clever quips are no match for a relationship that is clearly broken. Feeling betrayed, confused, and ill-equipped for a crisis this crippling, he reexamines everything he knows about the fragility of hope and the strength of his faith and love. Love seems to have failed him. Will what’s left of his faith fail him, too? Or will it be the one thing that holds him together and sears through the impenetrable wall that separates them?
Author: Mara B. Adelman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000149218
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
This book examines the concept of "community," focusing on how communication practices help manage the tensions of creating and sustaining everyday communal life amidst the crisis of human loss. While acknowledging how the contradictory and inconsistent nature of human relationships inevitably affects community, this intimate and compelling text shows how community is created and sustained in concrete communication practices. The authors explore these ideas at Bonaventure House, an award-winning residential facility for people with AIDS, where the web of social relationships and the demands of a life-threatening illness intersect in complex ways. Facing a life-threatening illness can defy meaningful social connections, but it can also inspire such ties, sometimes in ways that elude us in the course of daily life. By understanding how collective communication practices help residents forge a sense of community out of the fragility and chaos of living together with AIDS, we are able to better understand how communication is inexorably intertwined with the formation of community in other environments. Based on seven years of ethnographic research including participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and questionnaires, this book weaves together narratives and visual images with conceptual analysis to uncover the ongoing oppositional forces of community life, and to show how both mundane and profound communication processes ameliorate these tensions, and thereby sustain this fragile community. Because the average length of stay for a resident is seven months -- in which time he or she moves from being a newcomer to a community member to someone the community remembers -- the text reflects this short, but crystallized life, starting with the day a new resident opens the door to the day he or she passes away. The writing is rich -- intimate, engaging, personal, compelling, and vivid. The stories told discuss such deeply personal topics as the dilemmas of romantic relationships in a context fraught with many perils; issues of power, authority, and control that enable and constrain social life; and communicative practices that help residents cope with bereavement over the loss of others as well as their own impending deaths. The text concludes by examining the lessons learned from Bonaventure House about creating and sustaining a health community, and serves as an inspiration for strengthening interpersonal relationships and communities in other environments.
