![]() ![]() I didn’t know you could have a seizure from sadness. She is grieving the death of her brother, and her grief has sublimated into seizures. My specialty case is Stephanie Phillips, a twenty-three-year-old who suffers from something called conversion disorder. The scripts dig deep into our fictive lives: the ages of our children and the diseases of our parents, the names of our husbands’ real-estate and graphic-design firms, the amount of weight we’ve lost in the past year, the amount of alcohol we drink each week. We are supposed to unfurl the answers according to specific protocols. ![]() They tell us how much to give away, and when. They outline what’s wrong with us-not just what hurts but how to express it. Our scripts are ten to twelve pages long. Medical acting works like this: you get a script and a paper gown. I’m fluent in the symptoms of preeclampsia and asthma and appendicitis. I’m called a Standardized Patient, which means I act toward the norms of my disorders. M y job title is Medical Actor, which means I play sick. ![]()
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![]() Marit Weisenberg's This Golden State follows a family on the run, a restless teenage daughter hungry for the truth, and the simple DNA test that threatens their carefully crafted world Determined to protect her family but desperate for more, Poppy must ask: How much of herself does she owe her family? And is it a betrayal to find her own place in the world? Unravelling the shocking truth of her parents' real identities, Poppy realizes that the DNA test has undone decades of careful work to keep her family anonymous - and the past is dangerously close to catching up to them. Just as she starts to settle into her new life and even begins opening up to a boy in her math class, the forgotten test results bring her crashing back to reality. Determined to find out the truth, she mails in a home DNA test. ![]() When a move to California exposes a crack in her parents' airtight planning, Poppy realizes how fragile her world is. ![]() Still, her curiosity grows each year, as does her desire for real friends and the chance to build on something, instead of leaving behind school projects, teams, and crushes at a moment's notice. Poppy doesn't know why her family has been running her whole life, but she does know that there are dire consequences if they're ever caught. ![]() ![]() Even if it means breaking some old friendships and making some new ones.Īs they did in their groundbreaking novel George, in Rick, award-winning author Alex Gino explores what it means to search for your own place in the world. One of them leads to the school's Rainbow Spectrum club, where kids of many genders and identities congregate, including Melissa, the girl who sits in front of Rick in class and seems to have her life together. ![]() And he hasn't given his own identity much thought, because everyone else around him seemed to have figured it out.īut now Rick's gotten to middle school, and new doors are opening. He's let his father joke with him about which hot girls he might want to date even though that kind of talk always makes him uncomfortable. ![]() He's gone along with his best friend Jeff even when Jeff's acted like a bully and a jerk. From the award-winning author of George, the story of a boy named Rick who needs to explore his own identity apart from his jerk of a best friend. ![]() ![]() ![]() And with a feral guardian half-god, Gisele’s sinister fiancé, and an overeager junior detective on Vanja’s tail, she’ll have to pull the biggest grift yet to save her own life. Vanja has just two weeks to figure out how to break her curse and make her getaway. Then, one heist away from freedom, Vanja crosses the wrong god and is cursed to an untimely end: turning into jewels, stone by stone, for her greed. Now, Vanja leads a lonely but lucrative double life as princess and jewel thief, charming nobility while emptying their coffers to fund her great escape. ![]() The real Gisele is left a penniless nobody while Vanja uses an enchanted string of pearls to take her place. That was when Vanja’s otherworldly mothers demanded a terrible price for their care, and Vanja decided to steal her future back… by stealing Gisele’s life for herself. Vanja, the adopted goddaughter of Death and Fortune, was Princess Gisele’s dutiful servant up until a year ago. Vanja Schmidt knows that no gift is freely given, not even a mother’s love–and she’s on the hook for one hell of a debt. ![]() Once upon a time, there was a horrible girl… ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() After Seuss presents the reader with various things to think up, he then moves on to questions the readers should ask themselves, such as how much water can fifty elephants drink or what if someone meets a JIBBOO. After thinking of colors and known animals, then made up animals and made up dessert he moves on to made up activities, like Kitty O'Sullivan Krauss's balloon swimming pool. Other than that it is beautiful and has a cherry on top. Of all the made up things in this image the focus is on the dessert. The book begins with a reader thinking about colors or animals that she knows, like birds, or horses, but as quickly as page three he asks the reader to think of something completely made up a GUFF. "Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!" is also the name of a song in the musical play Seussical, which is based partly on this book. The book's front cover depicts forty-seven unknown creatures walking around on a cyan circle. The book is about the many amazing 'thinks' one can think and the endless possibilities and dreams that imagination can create. Seuss and published by Random House on August 21, 1975. Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Geisel under the pen name Dr. ![]() ![]() ![]() There often are conflicting theories as to why events unfolded as they did even when similarities to our own time appears in the historical record, their explanatory power isn’t always clear. To be sure, historical lessons are always hard to parse. So if you’re wondering how bad it can get, Brannen argues that “the history of mass extinctions provides the answer.” And given the Trump administration’s decision to quit the Paris Climate Agreement and drastically reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory power-well, this book is timely to say the least. ![]() The signs that humanity is flirting with its own extinction seem clear, whether our politicians admit it or not. ![]() ![]() As Brannen explains, life on earth has been almost extinguished five times over the course of our planet’s history, and he posits that the past can grant us a clearer understanding of our present situation. What does it take to kill the world? This is the main question environmental journalist Peter Brannen investigates in his new book, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions. ![]() ![]() ![]() These stories, alternatively touching and hilarious, reveal the pain beneath the kitschy veneer of 1940s mementos and taxidermied chickens. Douglas Couplands Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture: an alternative voice On production of his first novel, Coupland was labelled by critics. The true stories they relate are no less strange: Dag tells a particularly haunting tale about a Japanese businessman whose most prized possession, tragically, is a photo of Marilyn Monroe flashing. ![]() They fantasize about nuclear Armageddon and the mythical but drab Texlahoma, located on an asteroid, where it is forever 1974. ![]() The plot frames a loose Decameron -style collection of ``bedtime stories'' told by three friends, Dag, Andy and Claire, who have fled society for the relative tranquility of Palm Springs. ).'' These are just two of the many terse, bitterly on-target observations and cartoons that season the margins of the text. Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. ![]() Generation X is Douglas Coupland's classic novel about the generation born from 1960 to 1978a generation known until then simply as twenty somethings. Newcomer Coupland sheds light on an often overlooked segment of the population: ``Generation X,'' the post-baby boomers who must endure ``legislated nostalgia (to force a body of people to have memories they do not actually own)'' and who indulge in ``knee-jerk irony (the tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflexive matter of course. 14.49 31 Used from 4.26 25 New from 10.49. ![]() ![]() ![]() She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. “Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.”Ī portrait of the artist as a young woman. Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You ![]() "An addictive, sprawling epic I wolfed it down.” Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction A New York Times Book Review Notable Bookįinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The most important thing to understand about The Tibetan Book of the Dead is that it is meant to be read aloud. A classic of medieval Buddhist literature, it contains vivid descriptions of the bardos or intermediary states between death and rebirth that are, like other medieval texts, often illustrated. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an exemplar of Tibetan literary prose and a compelling commentary on the universal experience of death and dying from a Buddhist perspective. There are also multiple expert commentaries, ranging from scholarly discussions to Buddhist practice guides. At present, there are at least 21 translations in multiple languages and formats. Since it was first published in English in 1927, The Tibetan Book of the Dead has proved to be the most popular book on Tibetan Buddhism in the Western world. The article has been republished from The Conversation under the Creative Commons license. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Being diagnosed at the heartbreakingly young age of 29 had also knocked the ego out of his career ambitions, so he could do smaller things he was proud of – Stuart Little, the TV sitcom Spin City – as opposed to the big 90s comedies, such as Doc Hollywood, that were too often a waste of his talents. Parkinson’s, he said, had made him quit drinking, which in turn had probably saved his marriage. He called his 2002 memoir Lucky Man, and he told interviewers that Parkinson’s is a gift, “ albeit one that keeps on taking”.ĭuring our interview, surrounded by the memorabilia (guitars, Golden Globes) he has accrued over the course of his career, he talked about how it had all been for the best. Ever since 1998, when Fox went public with his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, he has made optimism his defining public characteristic, because of, rather than despite, his illness. The former I expected the latter was a shock. ![]() T he last time I spoke to Michael J Fox, in 2013, in his office in New York, he was 90% optimistic and 10% pragmatic. ![]() |