Millennial movements do not always go boom and bust. As innovative responses to worlds in crisis or projections of possibilities for a world in the doldrums, millennialism has been a prime mover for many an artistic and scientific vision of the world reconfigured. Flourishing well beyond the life of any prophet, bearing fruit well beyond the waning of any redemptive scheme, these visions merit a history of their own. The End that Does tracks the interplay of the arts, the sciences, and millennial imagination across 3000 years of surprising conclusions.

Millennial movements do not always go boom and bust. As innovative responses to worlds in crisis or projections of possibilities for a world in the doldrums, millennialism has been a prime mover for many an artistic and scientific vision of the world reconfigured. Flourishing well beyond the life of any prophet, bearing fruit well beyond the waning of any redemptive scheme, these visions merit a history of their own. The End that Does tracks the interplay of the arts, the sciences, and millennial imagination across 3000 years of surprising conclusions.

Listening across millennia, a cultural historian explores the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical-and intriguing-as the original Babel. When did the "silent deeps" become cacophonous and galaxies begin to swim in a sea of cosmic noise? Why do we think that noises have colors and that colors can be loud? How loud is too loud, and says who? Attending, as ears do, to a surround of sounds at once physical and political, Hillel Schwartz listens across millennia for changes in the Western experience and understanding of noise. From the uproarious junior gods of Babylonian epics to crying infants heard over baby monitors, from doubly mythic Echo to amplifier feedback, from shouts frozen in Rabelaisian air to the squawk of loudspeakers and the static of shortwave radio, Making Noise follows "unwanted sound" on its surprisingly revealing path through terrains domestic and industrial, urban and rural, legal and religious, musical and medical, poetic and scientific. At every stage, readers can hear the cultural reverberations of the historical soundwork of actresses, admen, anthropologists, astronomers, builders, composers, dentists, economists, engineers, filmmakers, firemen, grammar school teachers, jailers, nurses, oceanographers, pastors, philosophers, poets, psychologists, and the writers of children's books. Drawing upon such diverse sources as the archives of antinoise activists and radio advertisers, catalogs of fireworks and dental drills, letters and daybooks of physicists and physicians, military manuals and training films, travel diaries and civil defense pamphlets, as well as museum collections of bells, ear trumpets, megaphones, sirens, stethoscopes, and street organs, Schwartz traces the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical as the original Babel. Endnotes and bibliography are not included in the physical book but are available online at the MIT Press Web site.

Called to the bedside of someone critically or chronically ill, what should you bring, what can you do, what must you know, what will you say? Likely you've already sat with a grandparent, parent, brother, sister, lover, or friend in a hospital or nursing home and found yourself disturbed by certain medical protocols, mystified by lab reports, frustrated by insurance forms, benumbed by pharmocracy, thinking taboo thoughts about life or loss, and yourself on the verge of falling sick. LONG DAYS, LAST DAYS is for all of us who sooner or later will be sitting for hours with someone we love, senses heightened in the moment but all the while trying to imagine what lies ahead. Arranged alphabetically, this guide offers astute, practical, single-page entries on 200 topics including Advocacy, Checklists, Directives, Gatekeeping, Hospice, Intensive Care, Laughter, Medicine Cabinets, Mutual Peril, Overnight Bags, Pain relief, Sadness, Sex, Waiting, Wills, Young People, and Zero Visibility. You can learn to distinguish Acuteness from Emergency from Urgency, what to do with Blankets and Pillows, where to seek Help, how to hire caregivers, and what questions to ask Agencies, Nurses, Physicians, Social Workers. You may be curious as to why Keys, Nails, Teeth, and Tubes take on such significance. And you may be anxious to know how best, meanwhile, to attend to your own needs. As a case manager, Hillel Schwartz has worked with clients, families, and friends confronting brain injury, breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, heart disease, kidney failure, paralysis, stroke, and Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, as well as with households coping with dialysis, colostomies, paraplegia, memory loss. As an historian of medicine and technology, he can put in social and cultural context the language, traditions, and expectations that are often at odds among patients, nurses, internists, specialists, surgeons, and caregivers. All of this is reflected in the rich text of LONG DAYS, LAST DAYS, which has an extensive index and links to online resources and further reading/viewing. It is also thoroughly internally hyperlinked so that readers may move easily across associated topics, as from Noise to Snoring to Roommates to Respite. Unlike books on death and dying, spiritual communion or grief and bereavement, this guide takes into account the entire environment of the bedside, its shifting calendar and climate, its terrain and geography, its sense of presence and absence, its contests and compromises, its physical and ethical demands, and the relationships forged or strained, assumed or resumed. Long Days may not necessarily move through Last Months to Last Breaths, but for days, weeks, or months the bedside has its own ecology, for which few of us are ever fully prepared. Read in draft versions by dozens of laypeople as well as family physicians and neurologists, hospice nurses and psychologists, psychiatric social workers, sociologists, and social philosophers, LONG DAYS, LAST DAYS has been found to be equally useful for friends, families, and professionals, for those new to the bedside as for those returning yet again. Open it to a topic of immediate concern and follow the links. . . or look for subjects that have puzzled you in the past . . . or read it from start to finish in anticipation of what you may need to know in a not-so-distant future. Some entries are meditative, some sheerly informative; some are forthright, some celebratory; some ask for boldness, some for reflection. All told, they help ground and empower each of us in our times at the bedside, helping those we love, palm resting lightly, warmly, on the Breastbone.