Helping coaches and players streamline their learning systems, improve their performance, and further their understanding and enjoyment of the game, this book provides an entertaining and enlightening look at the physics behind how to use a racquet to change the speed and direction of a tennis ball. Distinguishing the science from the folklore and myth, it makes the physics of tennis understandable to players of all skill levels. Important issues such as the role of string tension, the meaning of power, the importance of swing weight, and the relevance of the various sweet spots are addressed. Athletes are shown how to play better tennis by obeying the laws of the universe, optimizing equipment for ultimate performance, and understanding the dynamics of tennis events. From speed-to-spin ratios and shock vibration scales to choosing string on a moist day, this guide covers it all.

For decades, medical professionals have betrayed the public's trust by accepting various benefits from the pharmaceutical industry. Both drug company representatives and doctors employ artful spin to portray this behavior positively to the public, and to themselves. In Hooked, Howard Brody argues that we can neither understand the problem, nor propose helpful solutions until we identify the many levels of activity connecting these purportedly noble industries. We can pass laws and enact regulations, but ultimately the medical profession must take responsibility for its own integrity. Hooked is a wake-up call for anyone expecting high quality, ethical medical care.

How does your opponent put that tricky spin on the ball? Why are some serves easier to return than others? The mysteries behind the winning strokes, equipment, and surfaces of the game of tennis are accessibly explained by Howard Brody through the laws of physics. And he gives practical pointers to ways players can use this understanding to advantage in the game.Through extensive laboratory testing and computer modeling, Brody has investigated the physics behind the shape of the tennis racket, the string pattern, the bounce of the tennis ball, the ways a particular court surface can determine the speed of the game, and the many other physical factors involved in tennis.

American politicians and policymakers tend to hold certain truths as self-evident-that the "free market" should be permitted to control as much of our lives and society as possible, and that the proper role of government is to get out of the market's way. In this book, Howard Brody challenges these so-called truths. He shows first that this way of thinking constitutes a belief system called economism. He next demonstrates that while economism claims to be a set of hard-headed scientific facts, it actually functions as a system of religious or quasi-religious beliefs. He finally traces the historical roots of economism to reveal that it takes many of its core ideas from two religious sources-evangelicalism in nineteenth century England, and the "Protestant Ethic" that evolved from Calvinist and Puritan beliefs in America in the eighteenth century. Brody explains that since economism is posing as a scientific, factual account of the world but actually is not, deception and stealth necessarily accompany economism wherever it rears its head. After giving examples of the tragic effects that policies promoted by economism have had on American life and culture, Brody discusses what we can do to rescue our future from this misguided way of thinking.

An examination of the moral principles and institutional arrangements that will be needed to drive any new health care reform inititive. Health care reform has been stalled since the Clinton health care initiative, but the political difficulties internal to that initiative and the ethical problems that provoked it -- of cost, coverage, and overall fairness, for example -- have only gotten worse. This collection examines the moral principles that must underlie any new reform initiative and the processes of democratic decision-making essential to successful reform. This volume provides careful analyses that will allow the reader to short-circuit the mythmaking, polemics, and distortions that have too often characterized public discussion of health care reform. Its aim is to provide the moral foundations and institutional arrangements needed to drive any new health care initiative and so to stimulate a reasoned discussion before the next inevitable round of reform efforts. Foreword by Thomas H. Murray. Contributors: HowardBrody, Norman Daniels, Theodore Marmor, Tobie H. Olsan, Uwe E. Reinhardt, Gerd Richter, Rory B. Weiner, Lawrence W. White Wade L. Robison is the Ezra A. Hale Professor in Applied Ethics at the Rochester Institute of Technology and recipient of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Prize for Social Science and Public Policy for his book Decisions in Doubt: The Environment and Public Policy. Timothy H. Engstroem is Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology and recipient of the Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching.

For decades, medical professionals have been betraying the public's trust by accepting various benefits from the pharmaceutical industry. Drug company representatives and doctors alike have promulgated creative rationalizations to portray this behavior positively, as if it really serves the interest of the public. In Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry, Howard Brody claims that we can neither understand the problem, nor propose helpful solutions until we fully recognize the many levels of activity that connect these two industries. Then, for real improvement to occur, the doctors themselves need to not only change their behavior, but also change how they view the actions of their peers and colleagues. We can pass laws and enact regulations, so that those physicians that do choose to focus on ethics won't be in an environment where they feel as if they are swimming against too strong a current to make meaningful change, but ultimately a profession has to take responsibility for its own integrity.

Although the physician's use and misuse of power have been discussed in the social sciences and in literature, they have never been explored in medical ethics until now. In this book, Dr. Howard Brody argues that the central task is not to reduce the physician's power, as others have suggested, but to develop guidelines for its use, so that the doctor shares with the patient both information and the responsibility for deciding on appropriate treatment. Dr. Brody first reviews literary works dealing with medical power, from Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" to stories by William Carlos Williams, Vonda McIntyre, and Richard Selzer. These works, he shows, reveal the healers' ambivalence over their own power and patients' fears of the abuse of power. Dr. Brody then points out important but neglected ethical issues that emerge from an analysis of power, such as the tension between care of individual patients and the pressures of the doctor's workload; the rescue fantasy that impels some physicians to extraordinary lengths to save a life; and the economic system, which rewards surgeons and other specialists more than it does physicians who spend time talking with patients about their problems. He also shows how the perspective of shared power can shed new light on standard topics in medical ethics--from informed consent and confidentiality to resource allocation and cost containment.

Bioethics, born in the 1960s and 1970s, has achieved great success, but also has experienced recent growing pains, as illustrated by the case of Terri Schiavo. In The Future of Bioethics, Howard Brody, a physician and scholar who dates his entry into the field in 1972, sifts through the various issues that bioethics is now addressing--and some that it is largely ignoring--to chart a course for the future. Traditional bioethical concerns such as medical care at the end of life and research on human subjects will continue to demand attention. Brody chooses to focus instead on less obvious issues that will promise to stimulate new ways of thinking. He argues for a bioethics grounded in interdisciplinary medical humanities, including literature, history, religion, and the social sciences.
Drawing on his previous work, Brody argues that most of the issues concerned involve power disparities. Bioethics' response ought to combine new concepts that take power relationships seriously, with new practical activities that give those now lacking power a greater voice. A chapter on community dialogue outlines a role for the general public in bioethics deliberations. Lessons about power initially learned from feminist bioethics need to be expanded into new areas--cross cultural, racial and ethnic, and global and environmental issues, as well as the concerns of persons with disabilities. Bioethics has neglected important ethical controversies that are most often discussed in primary care, such as patient-centered care, evidence-based medicine, and pay-for-performance.
Brody concludes by considering the tension between bioethics as contemplative scholarship and bioethics as activism. He urges a more activist approach, insisting that activism need not cause a premature end to ongoing conversations among bioethicists defending widely divergent views and thcories.

Our personalities and our identities are intimately bound up with the stories that we tell to organize and to make sense of our lives. To understand the human meaning of illness, we therefore must turn to the stories we tell about illness, suffering, and medical care. Stories of Sickness explores the many dimensions of what illness means to the sufferers and to those around them, drawing on depictions of illness in great works of literature and in non-fiction accounts. The exploration is primarily philosophical but incorporates approaches from literature and from the medical social sciences. When it was first published in 1987, Stories of Sickness helped to inaugurate a renewed interest in the importance of narrative studies in health care. For the Second Edition the text has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded. Four almost entirely new chapters have been added on the nature, complexities, and rigor of narrative ethics and how it is carried out. There is also an additional chapter on maladaptive ways of being sick that deals in greater depth with disability issues. Health care professionals, students of medicine and bioethics, and ordinary people coping with illness, no less than scholars in the health care humanities and social sciences, will find much of value in this volume.