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Books > Biography > Science, technology & engineering
* PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY * The compelling and moving memoir of
forensic psychiatrist Dr Duncan Harding
'Since I was a child, I've been interested in dead bodies. When I
was eight years old, I dug up the remains of my pet budgie Zazbut.
He had been buried for about eight weeks in a patch of grass
outside our house in Dasmarinas, a fortified village in Manila, in
the Philippines. 'The first exhumation was the beginning of my
intrigue with death, which has persisted. As a journalist, I've
written about graveyards, funerals and death doulas. I always visit
the local cemetery wherever I am in the world. But one thing that
has largely been hidden from me in this death trip is the dead
body.' Dissection might not be a normal topic to contemplate but
when both your paternal grandparents donate their bodies to science
it does intermittently cross your mind. This is the story of how
Jackie Dent's grandparents-Ruby and Julie-gave their bodies to
science when they died. No one in her family seems to know why, or
what really happened with their bodies afterwards. Were they avid
science buffs? Was it to save on cremation costs? How do scientists
tackle the practicalities and ethics of cutting up the dead for
research? And who are body donors generally? Weaving the personal
with the history of anatomy and the dissected, Jackie Dent explores
the world of whole-body donation - all the while looking for
answers as to what happened to her grandparents.
Join Hloni Bookholane on his journey of becoming a doctor: from student to intern at the world-famous Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town to the best school of public health in the world across the Atlantic, and back home amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are highs and lows – learnings and unlearnings – about the personal versus political as he discovers how government policy, socioeconomics and more influence disease and medicine.
By addressing the enigma of the exceptional success of Hungarian
emigrant scientists and telling their life stories, Brilliance in
Exile combines scholarly analysis with fascinating portrayals of
uncommon personalities. Istvan and Balazs Hargittai discuss the
conditions that led to five different waves of emigration of
scientists from the early twentieth century to the present.
Although these exodes were driven by a broad variety of personal
motivations, the attraction of an open society with inclusiveness,
tolerance, and - needless to say - better circumstances for working
and living, was the chief force drawing them abroad. While
emigration from East to West is a general phenomenon, this book
explains why and how the emigration of Hungarian scientists is
distinctive. The high number of Nobel Prizes among this group is
only one indicator. Multicultural tolerance, a quickly emerging,
considerably Jewish, urban middle class, and a very effective
secondary school system were positive legacies of the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Multiple generations, shaped by these
conditions, suffered from the increasingly exclusionist,
intolerant, antisemitic, and economically stagnating environment,
and chose to go elsewhere. "I would rather have roots than wings,
but if I cannot have roots, I shall use wings," explained Leo
Szilard, one of the fathers of the Atom Bomb.
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