"A fascinating, lyrical book... Reisman's experiences in other cultures bring a richness and depth to The Unseen Body. The way he thinks about the body and medicine—the rivers and tributaries, the flowing and unclogging, the top-down organization of the brain—is extraordinary!" —Mary Roach In this fascinating journey through the human body and across the globe, Dr. Reisman weaves together stories about our insides with a unique perspective on life, culture, and the natural world. Jonathan Reisman, M.D.—a physician, adventure traveler and naturalist—brings readers on an odyssey navigating our insides like an explorer discovering a new world with The Unseen Body. With unique insight, Reisman shows us how understanding mountain watersheds helps to diagnose heart attacks, how the body is made mostly of mucus, not water, and how urine carries within it a tale of humanity’s origins. Through his offbeat adventures in healthcare and travel, Reisman discovers new perspectives on the body: a trip to the Alaskan Arctic reveals that fat is not the enemy, but the hero; a stint in the Himalayas uncovers the boundary where the brain ends and the mind begins; and eating a sheep’s head in Iceland offers a lesson in empathy. By relating rich experiences in far-flung lands and among unique cultures back to the body’s inner workings, he shows how our organs live inextricably intertwined lives—an internal ecosystem reflecting the natural world around us. Reisman offers a new and deeply moving perspective, and helps us make sense of our bodies and how they work in a way readers have never before imagined.

In this erudite and profusely illustrated history of perception, Barbara Stafford explores a remarkable set of body metaphors deriving from both aesthetic and medical practices that were developed during the enlightenment for making visible the unseeable aspects of the world. While she focuses on these metaphors as a reflection of the changing attitudes toward the human body during the period of birth of the modern world, she also presents a strong argument for our need to recognize the occurrence of a profound revolution—a radical shift from a textbased to a visually centered culture. Stafford agues, in fact, that modern societies need to develop innovative, nonlinguistic paradigms and to train a broad public in visual aptitude.

Investigating the meanings and uses of "spiritus" in a variety of early modern disciplines and fields - natural philosophy, theology, music, literature and the visual arts - this book revisits the ambivalent history of a central ancient concept in a period of crisis and change.

A Texas Ranger and a U.S. Marshal take on a mystery that stretches back centuries as they help the FBI's Krewe of Hunters stop a serial killer, in book 5 in the beloved suspense series, only from New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham. San Antonio, Texas, 1800s: In room 207 at the Longhorn Saloon, in the long shadow of the Alamo, a woman was brutally murdered. Her killer was never found. One year ago, in that same historic room, another woman vanished without a trace. Now, San Antonio has become a dumping ground for battered bodies. When Texas Ranger Logan Raintree is approached to lead a group of elite paranormal investigators working the case, he accepts the challenge. And with it, his powerful ability to commune with the dead. U.S. Marshal Kelsey O'Brien has been waiting all her life to work with someone who can understand her ability to "see" the past. Now she has her chance. Together, Kelsey and Logan follow their instincts to the Alamo and to the newly reopened Longhorn, which once tempted heroes with drink, cards and women. If the spirits of those long-dead Texans are really appearing to the victims before their deaths, only Kelsey and Logan have the skills to find out why….

"Illustrated and with essays by Martin Kemp, Spectacular Bodies reveals a new way of seeing ourselves."--BOOK JACKET.

A first-year medical student describes an anatomy class during which she studied the donated body of a cadaver dubbed "Eve," an experience that profoundly influenced her subsequent studies and understanding of the human form.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Long Bright River: The moving story of a daughter’s quest to discover the truth about her beloved father’s hidden past. Ada Sibelius is raised by David, her brilliant, eccentric, socially inept single father, who directs a computer science lab in 1980s-era Boston. Home-schooled, Ada accompanies David to work every day; by twelve, she is a painfully shy prodigy. The lab begins to gain acclaim at the same time that David’s mysterious history comes into question. When his mind begins to falter, leaving Ada virtually an orphan, she is taken in by one of David’s colleagues. Soon she embarks on a mission to uncover her father’s secrets: a process that carries her from childhood to adulthood. What Ada discovers on her journey into a virtual universe will keep the reader riveted until The Unseen World’s heart-stopping, fascinating conclusion.

Between 1942 and 1945, 1,051 amphibious tank-landing ships were rapidly produced. These were anonymous vessels, slow and unwieldy, and in the words of one crewmember, they looked like bathtubs. At first, LSTs had a reputation of being expendable and of relatively low value, and so were bestowed another, less noble, nickname; “Large Slow Targets.” Put into service to get troops and equipment ashore, the story of LST 479 is in some respects the story of all of these ships. Typical of all early LSTs, its crew on commissioning day, April 19, 1943, consisted of raw amateurs. But over the next 1,046 days, through collisions, accidental groundings, navigational errors, and lots of mechanical breakdowns, the 479 crew became sailors. Displaying heroism and ingenuity, they rescued the crew of a crippled landing craft during an Alaskan storm, battled fires aboard a burning LST hit by kamikazes, and fought off air attacks on the way to Makin and Guam, at Saipan, in the Philippines and around Okinawa. This LST crew became the embodiment of the Navy’s 2018 recruiting slogan: “Forged by the Sea.” In gripping, meticulously researched, “you are there” fashion, author William A. Gay, recounts the fascinating history of the 479’s seven Pacific campaigns; from the day-to-day life of the men aboard her, to their terrifying encounters in battle as they delivered “unseen body blows” to the enemy that helped win the war in the Pacific.

We know more about the physical body—how it begins, how it responds to illness, even how it decomposes—than ever before. Yet not all bodies are created equal, some bodies clearly count more than others, and some bodies are not recognized at all. In Missing Bodies, Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore explore the surveillance, manipulations, erasures, and visibility of the body in the twenty-first century. The authors examine bodies, both actual and symbolic, in a variety of arenas: pornography, fashion, sports, medicine, photography, cinema, sex work, labor, migration, medical tourism, and war. This new politicsof visibility can lead to the overexposure of some bodies—Lance Armstrong, Jessica Lynch—and to the near invisibility of others—dead Iraqi civilians, illegal immigrants, the victims of HIV/AIDS and "natural" disasters. Missing Bodies presents a call for a new, engaged way of seeing and recovering bodies in a world that routinely, often strategically,obscures or erases them. It poses difficult, even startling questions: Why did it take so long for the United States media to begin telling stories about the "falling bodies" of 9/11? Why has the United States government refused to allow photographs or filming of flag-draped coffins carrying the bodies of soldiers who are dying in Iraq? Why are the bodies of girls and women so relentlessly sexualized? By examining the cultural politics at work in such disappearances and inclusions of the physical body the authors show how the social, medical and economic consequences of visibility can reward or undermine privilege in society.

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing “Grace Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us. Equal parts compassion and confession, The Body Papers is a stunning work by a powerful new writer who—like the best memoirists—transcends the personal to speak on a universal level.” —Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first. The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself. Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.