The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution PDF Author: Jonathan Eig
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245942
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
A Chicago Tribune "Best Books of 2014" • A Slate "Best Books 2014: Staff Picks" • A St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Books of 2014" The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution PDF Author: Jonathan Eig
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245942
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book

Book Description
A Chicago Tribune "Best Books of 2014" • A Slate "Best Books 2014: Staff Picks" • A St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Best Books of 2014" The fascinating story of one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid. Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

The Birth of the Pill

The Birth of the Pill PDF Author: Jonathan Eig
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0230770150
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then seventy-one, and who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building. She had come to meet a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation more than twenty years her junior. His name was Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, who battled his own church in the effort to win public approval for the controversial new drug, he succeeded. Together, these four determined men and women changed the world.Spanning the years from Sanger's heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and vividly written, The Birth of the Pillis a gripping account of a remarkable cultural, social and scientific journey

Opening Day

Opening Day PDF Author: Jonathan Eig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743294610
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
A chronicle of the 1947 baseball season during which Jackie Robinson broke the race barrier is a sixtieth anniversary tribute based on interviews with Robinson's wife, daughter, and teammates.

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights PDF Author: Katha Pollitt
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312620543
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A poet, essayist and columnist argues that abortion is a common part of a woman's reproductive life and shouldn't be vilified, but accepted as a moral right that can be a force for social good.

The Dancing Bees

The Dancing Bees PDF Author: Tania Munz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602105X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
“A triumph of science writing, a well crafted, deeply researched story of politics, ethics, and the fascinating lives of humans and bees.” —Jonathan Eig, New York Times–bestselling author We think of bees as being among the busiest workers in the garden, admiring them for their productivity. But amid their buzzing, they are also great communicators—and unusual dancers. As Karl von Frisch (1886–1982) discovered during World War II, bees communicate the location of food sources to each other through complex circle and waggle dances. As Tania Munz shows in this exploration of von Frisch’s life and research, this important discovery came amid the tense circumstances of the Third Reich. The Dancing Bees draws on previously unexplored archival sources in order to reveal von Frisch’s full story, including how the Nazi government in 1940 determined that he was one-quarter Jewish, revoked his teaching privileges, and sought to prevent him from working altogether until circumstances intervened. In the 1940s, bee populations throughout Europe were facing the devastating effects of a plague (just as they are today), and because the bees were essential to the pollination of crops, von Frisch’s research was deemed critical to maintaining the food supply of a nation at war. The bees, as von Frisch put it years later, saved his life. Munz not only explores von Frisch’s complicated career in the Third Reich, she looks closely at the legacy of his work and the later debates about the significance of the bee language and the science of animal communication. “Will surely become a classic in the literature on the history of biology in the twentieth century.” —Thomas D. Seeley, author of Honeybee Democracy

The Girls Who Went Away

The Girls Who Went Away PDF Author: Ann Fessler
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110164429X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
“A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review “A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

Living with a Wild God

Living with a Wild God PDF Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 1455501751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed comes a brave, frank, and exquisitely written memoir that will change the way you see the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the most important thinkers of our time. Educated as a scientist, she is an author, journalist, activist, and advocate for social justice. In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, she recounts her quest-beginning in childhood-to find "the Truth" about the universe and everything else: What's really going on? Why are we here? In middle age, she rediscovered the journal she had kept during her tumultuous adolescence, which records an event so strange, so cataclysmic, that she had never, in all the intervening years, written or spoken about it to anyone. It was the kind of event that people call a "mystical experience"-and, to a steadfast atheist and rationalist, nothing less than shattering. In LIVING WITH A WILD GOD, Ehrenreich reconstructs her childhood mission, bringing an older woman's wry and erudite perspective to a young girl's impassioned obsession with the questions that, at one point or another, torment us all. The result is both deeply personal and cosmically sweeping-a searing memoir and a profound reflection on science, religion, and the human condition. With her signature combination of intellectual rigor and uninhibited imagination, Ehrenreich offers a true literary achievement-a work that has the power not only to entertain but amaze.

Banner in the Sky

Banner in the Sky PDF Author: James Ramsey Ullman
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0064470482
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
The Citadel It stands unconquered, the last great summit of the Alps. Only one man has ever dared to approach the top, and that man died in his pursuit. He was Josef Matt, Rudi Matt's father. At sixteen, Rudi is determined to pay tribute to the man he never knew, and complete the quest that claimed his father's life. And so, taking his father's red shirt as a flag, he heads off to face the earth's most challenging peak. But before Rudi can reach the top, he must pass through the forbidden Fortress, the gaping chasm in the high reaches of teh Citadel where his father met his end. Rudi has followed Josef's footsteps as far as they will take him. Now he must search deep within himself to find the strength for the final ascent to the summit -- to plant his banner in the sky. His father died while trying to climb Switzerland's greatest mountain -- the Citadel -- and young Rudi knows he must make the assault himself.

From Aspirin to Viagra

From Aspirin to Viagra PDF Author: Vladimir Marko
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030442861
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From Aspirin to Viagra, insulin to penicillin, and vaccines to vitamin supplements, drugs have become part of our everyday lives. This staggering global industry wasn’t born overnight; advancements in pharmaceutical science have been happening for a long while, over the course of decades and even centuries. This book tells the history of ten prominent substances and how they came to be common household names. It shows how the creation of such influential drugs often began with the right person at the exactly right—or wrong!— time. The chapters tell the stories of geniuses and charlatans; scholars and amateurs; advances won through hard work or pure luck; and ultimately, the handful of resounding successes that revolutionized a global industry. Beyond the pioneers of the most famous drugs in our culture, the book analyzes how our perspective on medical treatment has shifted over the decades. Modern standards for testing and administering substances have created a new set of advantages, setbacks, and stigmas, all of which are discussed herein.

A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939 - 2000

A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939 - 2000 PDF Author: Paul Addison
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405141409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
A Companion to Contemporary Britain covers the key themesand debates of 20th-century history from the outbreak of the SecondWorld War to the end of the century. Assesses the impact of the Second World War Looks at Britain’s role in the wider world, including thelegacy of Empire, Britain’s ‘specialrelationship’ with the United States, and integration withcontinental Europe Explores cultural issues, such as class consciousness,immigration and race relations, changing gender roles, and theimpact of the mass media Covers domestic politics and the economy Introduces the varied perspectives dominating historicalwriting on this period Identifies the key issues which are likely to fuel futuredebate