When we or our loved ones fall ill, our world is thrown into disarray, our routines are interrupted, our beliefs shaken. David Morris offers an unconventional, deeply human exploration of what it means to live with, and live through, disease. He shows how desire—emotions, dreams, stories, romance, even eroticism—plays a crucial part in illness.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction: What Is Eros? -- Part One: The Contraries -- Chapter 1. The Ambush: An Erotics of Illness -- Chapter 2. Unforgetting Asklepios: Medical Eros and Its Lineage -- Chapter 3. Not-Knowing: Medicine in the Dark -- Part Two: The Stories -- Chapter 4. Varieties of Erotic Experience: Five Illness Narratives -- Chapter 5. Eros Modigliani: Assenting to Life -- Chapter 6. The Infinite Faces of Pain: Eros and Ethics -- Part Three: The Dilemmas -- Chapter 7. Black Swan Syndrome: Probable Improbabilities -- Chapter 8. Light as Environment: How Not to Love Nature -- Chapter 9. The Spark of Life: Appearances / Disappearances -- Conclusion: Altered States -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time A book about romantic love, Eros the Bittersweet is Anne Carson's exploration of the concept of "eros" in both classical philosophy and literature. Beginning with, "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her," Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view, creating a lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue. Epigrammatic, witty, ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Eros is an utterly original book.

This timely and innovative expose by contemporary Jungian psychoanalyst, Ken Kimmel, reveals a culturally and historically embedded narcissism underlying men's endlessly driven romantic projections and erotic fantasies, that has appropriated their understanding of what love is. Men enveloped in narcissism fear their interiority and all relationships with emotional depth that prove too overwhelming and penetrating to bear--so much so that the other must either be colonized or devalued. This wide-ranging work offers them hope for transcendence. Explores: Transcendence of Narcissism in Romance Men-s Capacity to Love Kabbalistic Mysticism Post-modern Philosophy Contemporary Trends in Psychoanalysis

In the years before, during, and after the First World War, hundreds of young Jews flocked to Paris, artistic capital of the world and center of modernist experimentation. Some arrived with prior training from art academies in Kraków, Vilna, and Vitebsk; others came armed only with hope and a few memorized phrases in French. They had little Jewish tradition in painting and sculpture to draw on, yet despite these obstacles, these young Jews produced the greatest efflorescence of art in the long history of the Jewish people. The paintings of Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Emmanuel Mané-Katz, the sculptures of Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine, Chana Orloff, and works by many other artists now grace the world's museums. As the École de Paris was the most cosmopolitan artistic movement the world had seen, the left-bank neighborhood of Montparnasse became a meeting place for diverse cultures. How did the tolerant, bohemian atmosphere of Montparnasse encourage an international style of art in an era of bellicose nationalism, not to mention racism and antisemitism? How did immigrants not only absorb but profoundly influence a culture? This book examines how the clash of cultures produced genius.

The ancient Greeks commonly resorted to magic spells to attract and keep lovers. Surveying and analyzing various texts and artifacts, the author reveals that gender is the crucial factor in understanding love spells.

What is eros? How does eros relate to sex? How can archetypes guide one on the journey of reclaiming eros? These are just a few of the questions presented in Reclaiming Eros: A Heroine's Journey. Reclaiming Eros is a shamanic initiation into erotic living as told through the lens of six feminine archetypes-Virgin, Whore, Warrior, Queen, Nun, Mother-whose stories are based on the author's descent into her own dormant desires. Using social and scholarly commentary, poetry, and fiction, Reclaiming Eros guides the reader on an inner erotic voyage-a heroine's journey that goes far beyond sex to the very core of that which makes us human.

This volume comprises articles by an international team of twenty-three scholars. The contributions focus on the historical genesis, stylistic and narrative features and evolution of pastoral, both as genre and mode, from Theocritus to the Byzantine period. Special attention has been paid to the idea of the 'invention of a fictionalized tradition', and to pastoral’s thematic and formal relationship with other literary genres. In their totality, the contributions, as well as offering a comprehensive overview of the more or less familiar issues and ideas discussed in connection with pastoral, point to new emphases, trends and insights in current scholarly work in this area. The volume is addressed to a wide range of students and scholars in classics, but much in it will also be of interest to those working in the fields of comparative and modern literatures.

“A powerful and extraordinarily important book.” —James P. Comer, MD “A marvelous personal journey that illuminates what it means to care for people of all races, religions, and cultures. The story of this man becomes the aspiration of all those who seek to minister not only to the body but also to the soul.” —Jerome Groopman, MD, author of How Doctors Think Growing up in Jim Crow–era Tennessee and training and teaching in overwhelmingly white medical institutions, Gus White witnessed firsthand how prejudice works in the world of medicine. While race relations have changed dramatically since then, old ways of thinking die hard. In this blend of memoir and manifesto, Dr. White draws on his experience as a resident at Stanford Medical School, a combat surgeon in Vietnam, and head orthopedic surgeon at one of Harvard’s top teaching hospitals to make sense of the unconscious bias that riddles medical care, and to explore how we can do better in a diverse twenty-first-century America. “Gus White is many things—trailblazing physician, gifted surgeon, and freedom fighter. Seeing Patients demonstrates to the world what many of us already knew—that he is also a compelling storyteller. This powerful memoir weaves personal experience and scientific research to reveal how the enduring legacy of social inequality shapes America’s medical field. For medical practitioners and patients alike, Dr. White offers both diagnosis and prescription.” —Jonathan L. Walton, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, Harvard University “A tour de force—a compelling story about race, health, and conquering inequality in medical care...Dr. White has a uniquely perceptive lens with which to see and understand unconscious bias in health care...His journey is so absorbing that you will not be able to put this book down.” —Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., author of All Deliberate Speed

This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.