Eng 112 Writing and Research in the Disciplines

Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body. As compulsively readable as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best, a must-read owner's manual for everybody.

Women growing older contend with ageism, misogyny, and loss. Yet as Mary Pipher shows, most older women are deeply happy and filled with gratitude for the gifts of life. Their struggles help them grow into the authentic, empathetic, and wise people they have always wanted to be. In Women Rowing North, Pipher offers a timely examination of the cultural and developmental issues women face as they age

Ehrenreich's core philosophy holds that aging people have the right to determine their quality of life and may choose to forgo painful and generally ineffective treatments. She presents evidence that such tests as annual physicals and Pap smears have little effect in prolonging life; investigates wellness trends, including mindfulness meditation; and questions the doctrine of a harmonious "mindbody" and its supposed natural tendency to prolong life

In America, having a mental illness has become a crime. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with mental illness. The country's three largest providers of mental health care are not hospitals, but jails. As many as half the people in US jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. In Insane, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to reveal how America's tough-on-crime policies have transformed it into a warehouse for people with mental illness, one where prisoners are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicke

Writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades?

Interwoven with Whitaker's groundbreaking analysis of the merits of psychiatric medications are the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic.

Smallpox, yellow fever, malaria, polio... now largely just unhappy history. Yet from our confrontations with these past plagues come lessons. As we struggle to understand and remedy problems like HIV/AIDS, coronary heart disease, and Ebola infection, Gehlbach shows how encounters with epidemics in the past will aid our present understanding of health and disease.

Throughout history, humans everywhere have searched for remedies to heal our bodies and minds. Covering everything from ancient herbs to cutting-edge chemicals, this book in the hugely popular Milestones series looks at 250 of the most important moments in the development of life-altering, life-saving, and sometimes life-endangering pharmaceuticals

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions

Why are humans so fond of water? Why is our skin colour so variable? Why aren't we hairy like our close ape relatives? mA savannah scenario of human evolution has been widely accepted primarily due to fossil evidence; and fossils do not offer insight into these questions. Other alternative evolutionary scenarios might, but these models have been rejected. This book explores a controversial idea - that human evolution was intimately associated with watery habitats as much or more than typical savannahs. Written from a medical point of view, the author presents evidence supporting a credible alternative explanation for how humans diverged from our primate ancestors.

The watchmaker belongs to the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed.

Ungar describes how a tooth's 'foodprints'--distinctive patterns of microscopic wear and tear--provide telltale details about what an animal actually ate in the past. These clues, combined with groundbreaking research in paleoclimatology, demonstrate how a changing climate altered the food options available to our ancestors, what Ungar calls the biospheric buffe

Rutherford describes Humanimal as being about the paradox of how our evolutionary journey turned 'an otherwise average ape' into one capable of creating complex tools, art, music, science, and engineering. It's an intriguing question, one his book sets against descriptions of the infinitely amusing strategies and antics of a dizzying array of animals.

When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits.

Based on in-depth interviews with providers and patients, Robert Klitzman explores how individuals and couples are facing quandaries of whether, when, and how to use ARTs.

After learning that she inherited a BRCA2 genetic mutation that put her at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer, Kim Horner's doctors urged her to consider having a double mastectomy. But how do you decide whether to have a surgery to remove your breasts to reduce your risk for a disease you don't have and may never get?

Horner shares her struggle to answer that question in Probably Someday Cance

n 'Blueprint', behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin describes how the DNA revolution has made DNA personal by giving us the power to predict our psychological strengths and weaknesses from birth.

Celebrated New York Times columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation.

Epigenetics can potentially revolutionize our understanding of the structure and behavior of biological life on Earth. It explains why mapping an organism's genetic code is not enough to determine how it develops or acts and shows how nurture combines with nature to engineer biological diversity. Surveying the twenty-year history of the field while also highlighting its latest findings and innovations, this volume provides a readily understandable introduction to the foundations of epigenetics

In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species--births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away--until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story--from 100,000 years ago to the present

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies --a fascinating history of the gene and "a magisterial account of how human minds have laboriously, ingeniously picked apart what makes us tick"

All Hell Breaking Loose is an eye-opening examination of climate change from the perspective of the U.S. military.

The Water-Food-Energy Nexus: Power, Politics and Justice lays out the managerial-technical definitions of the nexus and challenges these conceptions by bringing to the forefront the politics of the nexus, around two key dimensions - a dynamic understanding of water-food-energy systems, and a normative positioning around nexus debates, in particular around social justice. T

Climate change impacts - more heat, drought, extreme rainfall, and stronger storms - have already harmed communities around the globe. Even if the world could cut its carbon emissions to zero tomorrow, further significant global climate change is now inevitable.

The Colorado River is a crucial resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado's headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert.

A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes

Our daily lives are affected by new technologies at an ever increasing rate. It is becoming more and more important to assess future technologies from an ethical point of view, and to do this before they are introduced on a massive scale. Such assessments require systematic use of many different kinds of knowledge

"It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible

As a young mother facing a terminal diagnosis, Julie Yip-Williams began to write her story, a story like no other. What began as the chronicle of an imminent and early death became something much more--a powerful exhortation to the living.

The Breast Reconstruction Guidebook has been the best resource on this topic for women who have had a mastectomy. Equal parts science and support, it is filled with stories that illustrate the emotional and physical components of breast reconstruction

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane "biography" of cancer--from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

This book seeks to remedy this situation by providing scientific answers to the most basic yet important questions about existence.

Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us.

"The essential universe, from our most celebrated and beloved astrophysicist. What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us?

So how do we solve the paradox of wanting to live to a ripe old age--but enjoy the benefits of youth?
This groundbreaking book holds the answer. Working with thousands of patients, Dr. Gundry has discovered that the "diseases of aging" we most fear are not simply a function of age; rather, they are a byproduct of the way we have lived over the decade

In this eye-opening expose, acclaimed health journalist and National Geographic contributer Maryn McKenna documents how antibiotics transformed chicken from local delicacy to industrial commodity-and human health threat-uncovering the ways we can make America's favorite meat safer agai

This book lets us peer into the world of microbes--not as germs to be eradicated, but as invaluable parts of our lives--allowing us to see how ubiquitous and vital microbes are