My father's autobiographical recollections, given in the present chapter, were written for his children, - and written without any thought that they would ever be published. To many this may seem an impossibility; but those who knew my father will understand how it was not only possible, but natural. The autobiography bears the heading, 'Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character, ' and end with the following note: - "Aug. 3, 1876. This sketch of my life was begun about May 28th at Hopedene (Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood's house in Surrey.), and since then I have written for nearly an hour on most afternoons." It will easily be understood that, in a narrative of a personal and intimate kind written for his wife and children, passages should occur which must here be omitted; and I have not thought it necessary to indicate where such omissions are made. It has been found necessary to make a few corrections of obvious verbal slips, but the number of such alterations has been kept down to the minimum. - F.D.]

With a foreword by Bill Bryson 'Compelling . . . moving and often startlingly visceral' Times Literary Supplement 'Horrifying. But, in the end, inspiring.' William Leith, London Evening Standard 'A wonderful meditation on the human condition and a testament to the power of love' Max Pemberton, columnist and author of Trust Me, I'm a (Junior) Doctor 'As gripping as a thriller' Daily Express * * * At the age of 38, Rikke Schmidt Kjaergaard, a Danish scientist, wife and mother of three, is struck down by an acute bout of bacterial meningitis. She awakes from a coma in intensive care to find herself completely paralysed, unable to show she is conscious except by blinking her eye. It becomes her only form of communication as in the months that follow, Kjaergaard's husband Peter sits beside her helping to interpret every eye movement. She struggles with every basic of life - painfully learning how to breathe, move, eat and speak again. Despite being given a five per cent chance of survival, she works intensively to recover and achieve every small breakthrough. The Blink of an Eye is a celebration of love and family and every little thing that matters when life is in the balance - written by a scientist uniquely able to describe her physical and mental journey to recovery.

ONE OF AMAZON'S TOP 100 BOOKS OF 2014 Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Paabo's mission to answer this question: what can we learn from the genomes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010, Neanderthal Man describes the events, intrigues, failures, and triumphs of these scientifically rich years through the lens of the pioneer and inventor of the field of ancient DNA. We learn that Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominid relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery of why humans survived while Neanderthals went extinct. Paabo's findings have not only redrawn our family tree, but recast the fundamentals of human history,the biological beginnings of fully modern Homo sapiens , the direct ancestors of all people alive today.

Brand Pretorius knows what it means to be a leader: he was at the head of Toyota South Africa during its heyday, and took over as chief executive at the McCarthy Group. He knows that leadership means making hard and unpopular decisions with an eye on the long term.

He writes about his four decades in business and the lessons he learnt. He illustrates his lessons on leadership with tales from his illustrious career in motoring, like how it feels to be in a Formula 1 racing car with one of the world’s best drivers.

This book gives a rare insight into what it means to do business in South Africa, and how a South African business leader can navigate all of our country’s complexities.

Filled with the wisdom of hard experience, with lessons which, though in the first instance aimed at business people, can be applied in any sphere of life.

An inspirational and gripping book.

This much-needed bibliography and filmography brings together lists of books about Alzheimer's and caregiving, including biographies, poetry, and even fiction, as well as in instructional and dramatic films.

A mother tells the journey of her daughter's recovery from Autism and Sensory Processing Disorder to Functioning Recovery and independent living, giving tips to parents on how to navigate the medical and educational domain. This story is an example of the unique obstacles facing a parent raising a child with Autism. The challenges they face getting supports. What is Sensory Processing Disorder, CranioSacral Therapy and Bio-Medical Therapy, and what roles they play on the road to Functioning Recovery and independent living? See actual projective trials pertaining to sensory supports. Is educational discrimination the reason there is difficulty getting help in school? As this story unfolds it provides useful tips to other parents to help them on their journey with their child. This story is notable because this mother's daughter was successful overcoming numerous obstacles while providing useful tools, inspiration and hope to others.

He was history’s most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us?

Based on thousands of pages from Leonardo da Vinci's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo’s genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and an imagination so playful that it flirted with fantasy.

He produced the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and technology. With a passion that sometimes became obsessive, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry. His ability to stand at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences, made iconic by his drawing of Vitruvian Man, made him history’s most creative genius.

His creativity, like that of other great innovators, came from having wide-ranging passions. He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips, and then painted history’s most memorable smile. He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea, and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. Isaacson also describes how Leonardo’s lifelong enthusiasm for staging theatrical productions informed his paintings and inventions.

Leonardo’s delight at combining diverse passions remains the ultimate recipe for creativity. So, too, does his ease at being a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical. His life should remind us of the importance of instilling, both in ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.

When Jagannath Giri left India to seek a better future in the United States, he thought his wife and children would join him in short order. Just leaving his homeland was a big step. He had lived there all of his thirty-eight years, but he desperately wanted to further his education--and the best place to do that was in the United States.

Even though he arrived in the United States with just $8 in his pocket, he earned a doctoral degree in engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He became the first man in the world to prove that composite material is lighter and stronger than the conventional aluminum used to make airplanes, and his temporary separation from his family became more permanent when he accepted a job at his alma mater.

Giri fought valiantly to get his family visas to join him in the United States, but the paperwork was tedious, and his native country was fighting a "brain drain." After nine long years, however, the family was finally reunited.

In his autobiography, Giri looks back at how he fought to earn an education, keep his family together, and live a moral life.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, a loving husband and father, an enthusiastic teacher, a surprisingly accomplished bongo player, and a genius of the highest caliber---Richard P. Feynman was all these and more. "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track"--collecting over forty years' worth of Feynman's letters--offers an unprecedented look at the writer and thinker whose scientific mind and lust for life made him a legend in his own time. Containing missives to and from such scientific luminaries as Victor Weisskopf, Stephen Wolfram, James Watson, and Edward Teller, as well as a remarkable selection of letters to and from fans, students, family, and people from around the world eager for Feynman's advice and counsel, "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track" not only illuminates the personal relationships that underwrote the key developments in modern science, but also forms the most intimate look at Feynman yet available. Feynman was a man many felt close to but few really knew, and this collection reveals the full wisdom and private passion of a personality that captivated everyone it touched. "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track" is an eloquent testimony to the virtue of approaching the world with an inquiring eye; it demonstrates the full extent of the Feynman legacy like never before. Edited and with additional commentary by his daughter Michelle, it's a must-read for Feynman fans everywhere, and for anyone seeking to better understand one of the towering figures--and defining personalities--of the twentieth century.

Most people will, at some point or another, either find themselves dressed in a tiny hospital gown or staring at someone else dressed in a tiny hospital gown. Whether from the perspective of a patient, a family member, or a medical professional, we all have a significant stake in the process of medical education. While numerous memoirs recount physicians' grueling experiences during residency, few focus on the even more formative portion of medical training: the third year of medical school-the clinical year. Short White Coat: Lessons from Patients on Becoming a Doctor is the disarmingly honest, yet endearing and sometimes funny account of a medical student's humbling initiation into the world of patient care.

Written during his third year of medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, James Feinstein's Short White Coat uses a series of engaging narrative essays to illustrate the universal life lessons that his very first patients teach him. He gracefully examines some of the most common issues and feelings that medical students encounter while learning how to meet, talk with, touch, and care for their patients. Along the way, he learns from his own mistakes before discovering the answer to the question that plagues every medical student: "Do I have what it takes to become a doctor?"

Ships of Mercy tells the riveting true story of Mercy Ships, the astonishing fleet of hospital ships that sail the globe, bringing dramatic change to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the most impoverished and disease-stricken corners of the world. Ships of Mercy is a page-turner of the highest quality, an inspiring testimony both to the essence of the human spirit and God's amazing providence. It tells the story of a teenager's extraordinary vision brought to reality in the form of a multi-million dollar life-saving mission. It also tells the story of a family of people from diverse backgrounds who have sacrificed their comfort and security in order to perform remarkable acts of grace and kindness.

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far'. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going . . . From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks's earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels - sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents. With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions -bodybuilding, weightlifting, and swimming - also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual, his guilt over leaving his family to come to America, his bond with his schizophrenic brother, and the writers and scientists - Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick - who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer - and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.

In the memoir Beyond the Mountain Road the author shares his compelling life story beginning with his birth in a city nestled in the Colombian Andes and continuing with the fascinating details of his journey through a life built on hope, faith, dreams, ambition, and love.

With a warm, narrative style, Francisco Quintero vividly describes the events that shaped his character and personality. He reminisces about his childhood and recounts the difficult years he suffered as a young student following the persecution and destruction of his family due to political reasons. As he advances chronologically through his life, Dr. Quintero offers insight into his adventures in medical school, his initial encounters with patients during his hospital training, his introduction to the love of his life, and the creation of his family. His anecdotes-some humorous, some tragic-include details of the family's eventual voyage to the United States, where they live the American dream.

Beyond the Mountain Road is the remarkable true story of a family that was able to overcome obstacles and hardship through courage and determination. Above all, it is a captivating love story.

Richard Owen (1804-92) was, after Darwin, the most important figure in Victorian natural history. He was, for most of the six decades of his career, Britain's foremost comparative anatomist and vertebrate palaeontologist. Leader of the nineteenth-century museum movement, he founded London's monumental Natural History Museum, wrote and published copiously and won every professional honour. Positioned at the cutting edge of Victorian science, his work attracted enormous general interest, and he himself came to symbolise 'natural history' in the public mind. His company was sought by royalty (Prince Albert), prime ministers (especially Sir Robert Peel), and by contemporary literati such as Charles Dickens. Owen was, however, a controversial figure whose disagreements with colleagues developed into epic power struggles, the most notorious of which were with Darwin and Huxley. As the most renowned opponent of natural selection, Owen was type-cast as a Cuvierian creationist and became the bete noire of the Darwinian evolution debate. In this comprehensive intellectual and scientific biography, Nicolaas Rupke argues that Owen was no simple-minded anti-evolutionist and, moreover, should be freed from the distortion of the evolution dispute that was only a minor part of his work, yet has come to dominate his memory. Using the museum movement as the primary context of explanation, Rupke throws new light on a wide area of Owen's activities. He reveals the central division in Owen's scientific oeuvre between the functionalism of Oxbridge natural theology and the transcendentalism of German nature philosophy. This epistemological duality confused and puzzled his contemporaries as well as laterhistorians. But as Rupke convincingly demonstrates, it was a fundamental extension of the intellectual and political manoeuvering for control of Victorian cultural institutions, and an inextricable part of the rise to public authority of the most articulate proponents of the scientific study of nature.

V. I. Keilis-Borok (1921-2013) is the founder of computational seismology and the pioneer of advance predictions of critical events in complex systems, including earthquakes, presidential elections, economic recessions, surges of unemployment, and crime waves. Among his successful advance earthquake predictions are Irpinia earthquake in Italy (1980), Loma Prieta earthquake in California (1989), Chile earthquake of 2010, Japan earthquake of 2011, and many others.
V. I. Keilis-Borok developed new paradigms in the study of structure and dynamics of solid Earth. His trademark style involved exceptional organizational talent and insight that enabled him to make seemingly impossible connections between different fields of research and different groups of experts, often breaking the barriers between high theory, numerical modeling, and data analysis.
His outstanding achievements are recognized by memberships in many academies and international scientific organizations, including National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Academia Europea, Royal Astronomical Society, and others, as well as through awards and honors, and by the respect and devotion he inspired in his friends and colleagues.
This book contains his brief biography and reflections by his family, friends, and colleagues-a tribute to this truly remarkable man.
Proceeds from this book will support the effort in promoting and publicizing V.I. Keilis-Borok's work.

To Get Back Home is a medical thriller of the first order, a true story of triumph and survival over astronomical odds, as an otherwise healthy and active young woman fights for her life after being suddenly stricken by a rare neurological disorder, Acute Demyelinating Encephalomyelitis (ADEM). To Get Back Home takes you on a harrowing journey as Ms. Ford forges her way back from a coma and quadriplegia, desperate to return to her family and young children.

Her life seemed perfect until Wendy Ford was stricken and rendered comatose within days, and then, after a tense weeks-long battle for survival, quadriplegic. At one of the most renowned hospitals in the world, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the Harvard teaching hospital known as "Harvard with a heart," her doctors Harvard Medical School professors all were helpless to diagnose and treat her, hard as they tried, as the rare malady confounded even them and she slipped further and further away. Initially, she was not expected to live, or, ultimately, to walk again or recover her prior intellectual abilities. Doctors have referred to hers as a miracle case, but the mysteries persist to this day.

"An engaging, moving memoir that unravels at a quick pace. Straightforward and honest, emotional realism is achieved with quiet dignity, making it all the more poignant..."
-Kate Darnton, Contributing Editor,
PublicAffairs

"Impeccably done and so fascinating. Sometimes you read something that's really important and you have to at least try to get it out there..."
-Philip Spitzer, Literary Agent, NY, NY

"A poignant narrative...I was spellbound. You are a role model for your life-affirming persistence..."
-Weston Boer, Writer and Historian

"Immensely valuable to anyone in the clergy as they help people through dire straits."
-The Rev. Susan Flanders, Chevy Chase, MD

"Very moved by your manuscript, which I read from cover to cover, at once...Remarkable..."
-Diana Barrett, Harvard Business School

"Your very desire to live and not die was itself a kind of prayer."
-Professor Kimberley Patton, Harvard Divinity School

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, The Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion tons of gas of it. It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma just could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other. They succumbed to their gravitational attraction, and the galaxy we know as the Milky Way was born. Since then, the galaxy has watched as dark energy pushed away its first friends, as humans mythologized its name and purpose, and as galactic archaeologists have worked to determine its true age (rude). The Milky Way has absorbed supermassive (an actual technical term) black holes, made enemies of a few galactic neighbors, and mourned the deaths of countless stars. Our home galaxy has even fallen in love. After all this time, the Milky Way finally feels that it's amassed enough experience for the juicy tell-all we've all been waiting for. Its fascinating autobiography recounts the history and future of the universe in accessible but scientific detail, presenting a summary of human astronomical knowledge thus far that is unquestionably out of this world.