Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey PDF Author: Florence Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003499
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
Winner of the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A Smithsonian Best Science Book of 2022 • A Prospect Magazine Top Memoir of 2022 • A KCRW Life Examined Best Book of 2022 "Keen observer [and] deft writer" (David Quammen) Florence Williams explores the fascinating, cutting-edge science of heartbreak while seeking creative ways to mend her own. When her twenty-five-year marriage suddenly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. But when she starts feeling physically sick, losing weight and sleep, she sets out in pursuit of rational explanation. She travels to the frontiers of the science of “social pain” to learn why heartbreak hurts so much—and why so much of the conventional wisdom about it is wrong. Soon Williams finds herself on a surprising path that leads her from neurogenomic research laboratories to trying MDMA in a Portland therapist’s living room, from divorce workshops to the mountains and rivers that restore her. She tests her blood for genetic markers of grief, undergoes electrical shocks while looking at pictures of her ex, and discovers that our immune cells listen to loneliness. Searching for insight as well as personal strategies to game her way back to health, she seeks out new relationships and ventures into the wilderness in search of an extraordinary antidote: awe. With warmth, daring, wit, and candor, Williams offers a gripping account of grief and healing. Heartbreak is a remarkable merging of science and self-discovery that will change the way we think about loneliness, health, and what it means to fall in and out of love.

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative PDF Author: Florence Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393242722
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
"Highly informative and remarkably entertaining." —Elle From forest trails in Korea, to islands in Finland, to eucalyptus groves in California, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain. Delving into brand-new research, she uncovers the powers of the natural world to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships. As our modern lives shift dramatically indoors, these ideas—and the answers they yield—are more urgent than ever.

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History PDF Author: Florence Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393083861
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
A 2012 New York Times Notable Book A 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Award Winner in the Science & Technology category An engaging narrative about an incredible, life-giving organ and its imperiled modern fate. Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it’s sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with breast cancer, even among men. What makes breasts so mercurial—and so vulnerable? In this informative and highly entertaining account, intrepid science reporter Florence Williams sets out to uncover the latest scientific findings from the fields of anthropology, biology, and medicine. Her investigation follows the life cycle of the breast from puberty to pregnancy to menopause, taking her from a plastic surgeon’s office where she learns about the importance of cup size in Texas to the laboratory where she discovers the presence of environmental toxins in her own breast milk. The result is a fascinating exploration of where breasts came from, where they have ended up, and what we can do to save them.

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War PDF Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245454
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
A New York Times / National Bestseller "America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war. Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks? Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you’ll never see our nation’s defenders in the same way again.

Breakup Bootcamp

Breakup Bootcamp PDF Author: Amy Chan
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062914758
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
“A relationship expert whose work is like that of a scientific Carrie Bradshaw.” —THE OBSERVER A self-affirming, holistic guide for everyone—single or married, divorced or dating—to transforming heartbreak into healing by the founder of the innovative and revolutionary Renew Breakup Bootcamp Amy Chan hit rock bottom when she discovered that her boyfriend cheated on her. Although she was angry and broken-hearted, Chan soon came to realize that the breakup was the shakeup she needed to redirect her life. Instead of descending into darkness, she used the pain of the breakup as a bridge to self-actualization. She devoted herself to learning various healing modalities from the ancient to the scientific, and dived into the psychology of love. It worked. Fast forward years later, Amy completely transformed her life, her relationships and founded a breakup bootcamp helping countless women heal their hearts. In Breakup Bootcamp, Amy Chan directs her experience as a relationship columnist and as the creator of Renew Breakup Bootcamp into a practical, thoughtful guide to turning broken hearts into an opportunity to break out of complacency and destructive habits. Dubbed "the Chief Heart Hacker," Amy Chan grounds her practical advice and tried and tested methods rooted in cutting-edge psychology and research, helping first her bootcamp attendees and now her readers most effectively heal and reclaim their self-love. Breakup Bootcamp comes at the perfect time, when many are feeling the intensity of being in or out of a relationship, lonely or suffocated, and flirting with old toxic relationships they’ve outgrown. Relatable, life-changing, and backed by sound scientific research, Breakup Bootcamp can help anyone turn their greatest heartbreak into a powerful tool for growth.

Ladyparts

Ladyparts PDF Author: Deborah Copaken
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 1984855492
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Book Description
A frank, witty, and dazzlingly written memoir of one woman trying to keep it together while her body falls apart—from the “brilliant mind” (Michaela Coel, creator of I May Destroy You) behind Shutterbabe “The most laugh-out-loud story of resilience you’ll ever read and an essential road map for the importance of narrative as a tool of healing.”—Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE I’m crawling around on the bathroom floor, picking up pieces of myself. These pieces are not a metaphor. They are actual pieces. Twenty years after her iconic memoir Shutterbabe, Deborah Copaken is at her darkly comedic nadir: battered, broke, divorcing, dissected, and dying—literally—on sexism’s battlefield as she scoops up what she believes to be her internal organs into a glass container before heading off to the hospital . . . in an UberPool. Ladyparts is Copaken’s irreverent inventory of both the female body and the body politic of womanhood in America, the story of one woman brought to her knees by the one-two-twelve punch of divorce, solo motherhood, healthcare Frogger, unaffordable childcare, shady landlords, her father’s death, college tuitions, sexual harassment, corporate indifference, ageism, sexism, and plain old bad luck. Plus seven serious illnesses, one atop the other, which provide the book’s narrative skeleton: vagina, uterus, breast, heart, cervix, brain, and lungs. Copaken bounces back from each bum body part, finds workarounds for every setback—she transforms her home into a commune to pay rent, sells her soul for health insurance, turns FBI informant when her sexual harasser gets a presidential appointment—but in her slippery struggle to survive a steep plunge off the middle-class ladder, she is suddenly awoken to what it means to have no safety net. Side-splittingly funny one minute, a freak horror show the next, quintessentially American throughout, Ladyparts is an era-defining memoir.

The Stone Girl: A Novel

The Stone Girl: A Novel PDF Author: Dirk Wittenborn
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
The Stone Girl is a riveting tale of deception, vengeance, and power set against the haunting beauty of the Adirondack wilderness. Deep in the Adirondack Mountains lies a speck of a town called Rangeley. There isn’t much to this tiny town, but it is at the crossroads of serene fishing streams off the Mink River, pristine hunting grounds in the surrounding mountains, and vast estates of the extremely rich. It is also the gateway to the Mohawk Club, which houses the Lost Boys, an exclusive group of wealthy and powerful men with global influence and a taste for depravity. Raised wild and poor in the shadows of the Mohawk Club, Evie Quimby was a teenager when she first fell victim to the Lost Boys. Seventeen years later, she is now a world-renowned art restorer famous for repairing even the most-broken statues. After spending half her life in Paris, establishing her reputation and raising her daughter Chloé, Evie has come a long way from the girl who left Rangeley behind. But when Chloé receives a visit from an elegant stranger who claims to be an old friend of her mother’s, the ghosts of Evie’s past return in full force, pulling her back to the North Country of her girlhood and into the tangled, intricate web of the Lost Boys. Evie bands together with her formidable mother and an embattled heiress, both victims of the Lost Boys, in pursuit of an unusual and heart-stopping vengeance.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait PDF Author: Bathsheba Demuth
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393635171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
A groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between capitalism, communism, and Arctic ecology since the dawn of the industrial age. Whales and walruses, caribou and fox, gold and oil: through the stories of these animals and resources, Bathsheba Demuth reveals how people have turned ecological wealth in a remote region into economic growth and state power for more than 150 years. The first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada, Floating Coast breaks away from familiar narratives to provide a fresh and fascinating perspective on an overlooked landscape. The unforgiving territory along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before Americans and Europeans arrived with revolutionary ideas for progress. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would the great modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, as well as from archival sources, Demuth shows how the social, the political, and the environmental clashed in this liminal space. Through the lens of the natural world, she views human life and economics as fundamentally about cycles of energy, bringing a fresh and visionary spin to the writing of human history. Floating Coast is a profoundly resonant tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that immense human needs and ambitions have brought, and will continue to bring, to a finite planet.

The Fear of Happiness

The Fear of Happiness PDF Author: C.R. Asher
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1387754912
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 38

Book Description
A collection of melodromatic melancholic measures by C.R. Asher.

The Little Book of Heartbreak

The Little Book of Heartbreak PDF Author: Meghan Laslocky
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110160283X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
The perfect anti-valentine: a whirlwind tour through love’s most crushing moments What’s the best way to mend a broken heart? Forget ice cream, wine, and sappy movies. Journalist Meghan Laslocky advises: Read through the pain. From forbidden love in 12th century Paris to the art of crafting the perfect “I’m over you” mix, The Little Book of Heartbreak is a quirky exploration of all things lovelorn, including: • How serial cheater Ernest Hemingway stole his wife’s job just as their marriage was collapsing • Kinky spells cast by lovesick men in ancient Greece • Painter Oscar Kokoschka’s attempt to get over an ex by creating (and having liaisons with!) her life-size replica • Brooding crooner Morrissey’s personal creed about how romantic love is useless • The surprising science behind heartbreak and love addiction • The connection between World War II and what you talk about with your therapist • Insights into the tricky chemistry of monogamy and infidelity, courtesy of tiny rodents • And other lessons learned from ill-fated romances, lovers’ quarrels, and hell-hath-no-fury spats throughout the ages Featuring anecdotes from history, literature, culture, art and music, The Little Book of Heartbreak shares the entertaining, empowering and occasionally absurd things that happen when love is on its last legs.