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Author: Katherine E. Standefer Publisher: Little, Brown Spark ISBN: 0316450359 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 281
Book Description
This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.
Author: Esperanza U. Ramirez-Christensen Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804722537 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 510
Book Description
Shinkei (1406-75), one of the most brilliant poets of medieval Japan, is a pivotal figure in the development of renga (linked poetry) as a serious art. In an age when anyone who wished to signal his denial of mundane concerns or make his way in the world with relative freedom donned the robes of a monk, Shinkei stood out by being a practicing cleric with a temple in Kyoto, the Japanese capital. His priestly duties and his devotion to Buddhist ideals are directly reflected in the intensely pure, lyrical longing for transcendence that is the most notable quality of his sensibility. Shinkei's life and work also provide a vivid portrayal of a tumultuous period of Japanese history that was one of the defining moments of its culture, when Zen Buddhism began to directly influence the arts. The book is in two parts. The first part is a literary biography based primarily on Shinkei's own writings - his critical essays, waka sequences, hokku collections, and commentaries - supplemented by various external sources. What emerges is the compelling portrait of a man who bore witness to the tragic anarchy of his times while clinging to the ideal of poetic practice as a mode of being and access to Buddhist enlightenment. Shinkei became embroiled in the factional struggles preceding the Onin War (1467-77) and died a refugee in what is now Kanagawa. The second part consists of annotated translations of Shinkei's most representative poetry: (1) selected hokku (opening verse of a sequence) and tsukeku (linked pairs of verses), along with Muromachi-period commentaries on them; (2) two 100-verse renga sequences - the first a solo composition from 1467, and the second a collaboration with Sogi and other poet-priests and samurai from 1468; and (3) a selection of one hundred waka poems highlighting Shinkei's most characteristic mode of ineffable remoteness. Throughout, the author's annotations seek to define and clarify the unique genre called "linked poetry."