Author: Sam Kean
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316381632
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
The Guardian's Best Science Book of 2017: the fascinating science and history of the air we breathe. It's invisible. It's ever-present. Without it, you would die in minutes. And it has an epic story to tell. In Caesar's Last Breath, New York Times bestselling author Sam Kean takes us on a journey through the periodic table, around the globe, and across time to tell the story of the air we breathe, which, it turns out, is also the story of earth and our existence on it. With every breath, you literally inhale the history of the world. On the ides of March, 44 BC, Julius Caesar died of stab wounds on the Senate floor, but the story of his last breath is still unfolding; in fact, you're probably inhaling some of it now. Of the sextillions of molecules entering or leaving your lungs at this moment, some might well bear traces of Cleopatra's perfumes, German mustard gas, particles exhaled by dinosaurs or emitted by atomic bombs, even remnants of stardust from the universe's creation. Tracing the origins and ingredients of our atmosphere, Kean reveals how the alchemy of air reshaped our continents, steered human progress, powered revolutions, and continues to influence everything we do. Along the way, we'll swim with radioactive pigs, witness the most important chemical reactions humans have discovered, and join the crowd at the Moulin Rouge for some of the crudest performance art of all time. Lively, witty, and filled with the astounding science of ordinary life, Caesar's Last Breath illuminates the science stories swirling around us every second.
Author: James Nestor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735213631
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.
Author: Gerry Christmas
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1483429210
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Author Gerry Christmas is one of "Kennedy's Children," an idealist who answered the call to join the Peace Corps not once but twice. In Breathing the Same Air, a gritty memoir of love and loss, he narrates his volunteer experiences in both Thailand and Samoa. From the sultry alleys of Bangkok to the serpentine paths of his Polynesian island, Christmas explores new frontiers of mind, body, and spirit. He shares stories from cross-cultural miscues and screw-ups to Peace Corps politics and squabbles. He also ventures into the classroom where he talks about his Thai and Samoan students who effuse a certain candor, curiosity, and charm. And he narrates pursuing Aied, his long-lost love, and the difficult decision to return to the United States. As Christmas looks back on his Peace Corps days, he is mindful of President Kennedy's words: "... we all inhabit this small planet. We all cherish our children's futures. We all breathe the same air. And we are all mortal."
Author: Estelle af Malmborg
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
ISBN: 9783775734554
Category : Photography, Artistic
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Young Finnish photographer Nelli Palomäki (born 1981) is a graduate of Helsinki's renowned Aalto University School of Art, Design and Architecture. In her work, she aims to recapture the lost magic that was once inherent in photography. Even 50 years ago, having one's photograph taken was a special event; people donned their Sunday best and gazed, unmoving and serious, into the camera. Palomäki's models likewise tend not to smile, looking steadfastly at us with the kind of openness and attention that could be said to characterize the work of their photographer. This volume gathers Palomäki's black-and-white portraits, mostly of children and young people. The photographer says she wonders what her models will look like ten years from now; her contemplative photographs provoke a like sense of wonder in the viewer.
Author: Abigail Stahl McNamee Ed.D. Ph.D.
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency
ISBN: 1631353136
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 459
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Book Description
The common goal of integrated education in Northern Ireland is to bring Protestant and Catholic children together in schools in an attempt to foster an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect. These integrated schools stress what the divided communities have in common, rather than what divides them. They remain, however, a small percentage of Northern Ireland’s schools. There are many stories of the long discord in Northern Ireland between the Protestant and Catholic communities. Breathing the Same Air: Children, Schools, and Politics in Northern Ireland focuses on the stories of the integrated education movement, the context in which it began and continues to develop, and an American researcher’s experience as she learned of these stories. Dr. Abigail Stahl McNamee is an American educator who went to Northern Ireland for many years to write about the stories of the integrated education movement. She asks: “What families and schoolpersonnel have participated in the movement? What risks have they taken to do so? What church personnel and politicians have supported it? What do the children who attend an integrated school, and those who attend the State (Protestant) and Catholic schools in the same community, understand about the uniqueness of the school that they attend? Do their friendship patterns extend beyond their own school to the other schools in their community? How has the integrated education movement changed over the years? How can this movement resonate with Americans?”
Author: Ed D. Ph. D. Abigail Stahl McNamee
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency
ISBN: 1609110307
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 459
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Book Description
There are many stories of the long discord in Northern Ireland between the Protestant and Catholic communities. Breathing the Same Air: Children, Schools, and Politics in Northern Ireland focuses on the stories of the integrated education movement in Northern Ireland, the context in which the integrated education movement began and continues to develop, and an American researcher's experience as she learned of these stories. It relates how the common goal of integrated education has brought Protestant and Catholic children together in schools in an attempt to foster an atmosphere of mutual understanding and respect. The integrated schools stress what these two communities of Northern Ireland have in common, rather than what divides them.
Author: Curt Stager
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250018854
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
What do atoms have to do with your life? In Your Atomic Self, scientist Curt Stager reveals how they connect you to some of the most amazing things in the universe. You will follow your oxygen atoms through fire and water and from forests to your fingernails. Hydrogen atoms will wriggle into your hair and betray where you live and what you have been drinking. The carbon in your breath will become tree trunks, and the sodium in your tears will link you to long-dead oceans. The nitrogen in your muscles will help to turn the sky blue, the phosphorus in your bones will help to turn the coastal waters of North Carolina green, the calcium in your teeth will crush your food between atoms that were mined by mushrooms, and the iron in your blood will kill microbes as it once killed a star. You will also discover that much of what death must inevitably do to your body is already happening among many of your atoms at this very moment and that, nonetheless, you and everyone else you know will always exist somewhere in the fabric of the universe. You are not only made of atoms; you are atoms, and this book, in essence, is an atomic field guide to yourself.
Author: Paul Kalanithi
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812988418
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Author: Jordan Gross
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1953295185
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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Book Description
Bestselling author and TEDx speaker Jordan Gross's What Happens in Tomorrow World? offers a poignant, relatable, and necessary parable for navigating uncertainty. What Happens in Tomorrow World? tells the story of Opti, Pessi, Chill, and Sage—four prizes found in a traditional arcade claw machine game, and what happens when one special player, Cayla "Catch" Alltoys, plays their game. As Catch maneuvers the claw over, down, and around them, the four prizes face their own crisis—the possibility of what will happen when they are removed from their safe environment and thrust into the unknown "real" world. Each prize reacts in one of the four typical responses most people have to facing uncertain situations. And it is through those reactions, and subsequent actions, that they—and we—learn how our own responses to uncertainty can either help or harm ourselves, those around us, and society as a whole. An urgently needed guide for managing the anxiety and ambiguity in our daily lives, this book will help readers thrive in challenging situations. Through this memorable story, you'll learn: • How to embrace uncertainty in all parts of life • Why no single response to uncertainty works for every situation • How various personality types typically respond differently to uncertainty • Why it's crucial to resist responding negatively to uncertainty • Why it's important to take action, no matter how uncertain you feel In the spirit of Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese? presents a modern, unique, and useful toolbox for confronting and managing the overwhelming amount of uncertainty we face every day.
Author: Maya Ajmera
Publisher: Charlesbridge Publishing
ISBN: 1580896162
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36
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Book Description
Clean air is essential for all living creatures—plants, animals, and people—to live healthy lives. Every Breath We Take is a positive, life-affirming look at clean air, with a subtle message about how air can be dirtied—and how it can be cleaned up. Photographs of beautiful children around the world exploring air through touch, smell, sound, and sight underscore the importance of clean air to all life on earth. This is science that surrounds us. The first step to cherishing something is recognizing its importance and understanding why it is necessary. A portion of the proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to Moms Clean Air Force, a national movement of over a half million moms, dads, and grandparents who are protecting the right of every child to breathe clean air.
