https://arab.news/vs9td
At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
With US power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War’s “Third World”— developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the US or Soviet Union.
Yet by the end of the decade, this vision lay in ruins.
Authors: RICHARD GRIMMETT, CAROL INSKIPP, AND TIM INSKIPP
The best field guide to the birds of the Indian subcontinent is now even better.
Thoroughly updated and substantially expanded, this third edition of “Birds of India” features revised color plates, text, and distribution maps, and 64 more pages than the previous edition.
Comprehensive and definitive, this is an indispensable guide for anyone birding in this part of the world.
Authors: Prudentius and Plutarch
Edited and translated by Michael Fontaine
“How to Have Willpower” brings together two profound ancient meditations on how to overcome pressures that encourage us to act against our own best interests—Plutarch’s essay On Dysopia or How to Resist Pressure and Prudentius’s poetic allegory Psychomachia or How to Slay Your Demons.
Challenging the idea that humans are helpless victims of vice, these works—introduced and presented in vivid, accessible new prose translations by Michael Fontaine, with the original Latin and Greek texts on facing pages—emphasize the power of personal choice and the possibility of personal growth, as they offer insights and practical advice about resisting temptation.
In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying “yes” against our better judgment. And in a delightfully different work, Prudentius, a Latin Christian poet, dramatizes the necessity to actively fight temptation through the story of an epic battle within the human soul between fierce warrior women representing our virtues and vices.
Published a year after the author’s death aged 37 in 2015, “When Breath Becomes Air” is an autobiography about the life and struggle with terminal lung cancer of Dr. Paul Kalanithi.
In the book, Kalanithi, an American neurosurgeon at Stanford University, talks about his own journey from being a physician providing treatment to his patients to becoming a patient himself facing premature mortality.
The narrative moves from talking about how Kalanithi saved lives to confronting the end of his own, reflecting on what makes life worth living in the face of death.
Despite his diagnosis, Kalanithi continued working as a physician and even became a father, explaining to his readers how he embraced life fully until the very end.
Unfortunately, the book had to be completed by his wife after his passing, and serves as a moving meditation on legacy, purpose, and the human experience.
Among the book’s strengths are its authenticity and depth of emotions, touching on everything from the day-to-day experiences of physicians to Kalanithi’s own love of literature — originally, he had studied English at university. A fitting tribute, then, that his own work would go on to become a New York Times’ bestseller.
Neurosurgery, though, was in his words an “unforgiving call to perfection” which not even his diagnosis could check. “Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when,” he wrote. “After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when.”
The book garnered praise upon publication, winning the Goodreads Choice Award for Memoir and Autobiography in 2016. Its run on the NYT’s bestseller list lasted an impressive 68 weeks.
Writing in the Guardian, Alice O’Keefe suggested: “The power of this book lies in its eloquent insistence that we are all confronting our mortality every day, whether we know it or not. The real question we face, Kalanithi writes, is not how long, but rather how, we will live — and the answer does not appear in any medical textbook.”
Author: Steven A. Balbus
General relativity has entered a new phase of its development as technical advances have led to the direct detection of gravitational radiation from the merging of single pairs of stellar-sized black holes. The exquisite sensitivity of pulsar signal timing measurements has also been exploited to reveal the presence of a background of gravitational waves, most likely arising from the mergers of supermassive black holes thought to be present at the center of most galaxies. This book demonstrates how general relativity is central to understanding these and other observations.
As a graduate student at MIT, Steve Ramirez successfully created false memories in the lab. Now, as a neuroscientist working at the frontiers of brain science, he foresees a future where we can replace our negative memories with positive ones.
In “How to Change a Memory,” Ramirez draws on his own memories—of friendship, family, loss, and recovery—to reveal how memory can be turned on and off like a switch, edited, and even constructed from nothing.
