Fixing My Gaze

Author: Susan R. Barry
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 078674474X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
A revelatory account of the brain's capacity for change When neuroscientist Susan Barry was fifty years old, she experienced the sense of immersion in a three dimensional world for the first time. Skyscrapers on street corners appeared to loom out toward her like the bows of giant ships. Tree branches projected upward and outward, enclosing and commanding palpable volumes of space. Leaves created intricate mosaics in 3D. Barry had been cross-eyed and stereoblind since early infancy. After half a century of perceiving her surroundings as flat and compressed, on that day she saw the city of Manhattan in stereo depth for first time in her life. As a neuroscientist, she understood just how extraordinary this transformation was, not only for herself but for the scientific understanding of the human brain. Scientists have long believed that the brain is malleable only during a "critical period" in early childhood. According to this theory, Barry's brain had organized itself when she was a baby to avoid double vision - and there was no way to rewire it as an adult. But Barry found an optometrist who prescribed a little-known program of vision therapy; after intensive training, Barry was ultimately able to accomplish what other scientists and even she herself had once considered impossible. Dubbed "Stereo Sue" by renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks, Susan Barry tells her own remarkable journey and celebrates the joyous pleasure of our senses.

Coming to Our Senses

Author: Susan R. Barry
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541675169
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
A neurobiologist reexamines the personal nature of perception in this groundbreaking guide to a new model for our senses. We think of perception as a passive, mechanical process, as if our eyes are cameras and our ears microphones. But as neurobiologist Susan R. Barry argues, perception is a deeply personal act. Our environments, our relationships, and our actions shape and reshape our senses throughout our lives. This idea is no more apparent than in the cases of people who gain senses as adults. Barry tells the stories of Liam McCoy, practically blind from birth, and Zohra Damji, born deaf, in the decade following surgeries that restored their senses. As Liam and Zohra learned entirely new ways of being, Barry discovered an entirely new model of the nature of perception. Coming to Our Senses is a celebration of human resilience and a powerful reminder that, before you can really understand other people, you must first recognize that their worlds are fundamentally different from your own.

Arctic Dreams

Author: Barry Lopez
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1668080028
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Winner of the National Book Award This bestselling, groundbreaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing. The Arctic is a perilous place. Only a few species of wild animals can survive its harsh climate. In this modern classic, Barry Lopez explores the many-faceted wonders of the Far North: its strangely stunted forests, its mesmerizing aurora borealis, its frozen seas. Musk oxen, polar bears, narwhal, and other exotic beasts of the region come alive through Lopez’s passionate and nuanced observations. And, as he examines the history and culture of its indigenous communities, along with parallel narratives of intrepid, often underprepared and subsequently doomed polar explorers, Lopez drives to the heart of why the austere and formidable Arctic is also a constant source of breathtaking beauty, mystery, and wonder. Written in prose as pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.

Dwell

Author: Barry D. Jones
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830896546
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Christians often wrestle with their role in this fallen, physical world. But Jesus, the Incarnate One, offers a radical model for living as he teaches us how to dwell in the world for the sake of the world. If we are to become like him, we must learn what it means to live out this missional spirituality in the places we dwell.

Days Without End

Author: Sebastian Barry
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698168631
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD WINNER LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER PRIZE "A true leftfield wonder: Days Without End is a violent, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making."—Kazuo Ishiguro, Booker Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and The Buried Giant From the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist Sebastian Barry, “a master storyteller” (Wall Street Journal), comes a powerful new novel of duty and family set against the American Indian and Civil Wars Thomas McNulty, aged barely seventeen and having fled the Great Famine in Ireland, signs up for the U.S. Army in the 1850s. With his brother in arms, John Cole, Thomas goes on to fight in the Indian Wars—against the Sioux and the Yurok—and, ultimately, the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, the men find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. An intensely poignant story of two men and the makeshift family they create with a young Sioux girl, Winona, Days Without End is a fresh and haunting portrait of the most fateful years in American history and is a novel never to be forgotten.

God's Great Story and You

Author: William A. Barry
Publisher: Loyola Press
ISBN: 0829454314
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Book Description
You have a place in God’s great story. The divine narrative begins With The creation of the universe and continues through humanity’s fall and struggle, the promises of the prophets, and the coming of Jesus. The story unfolds to reveal God’s mercy for us over our history of sin and redemption, and the plot includes us as partners in God’s great dream for the world. In his parting message to us, Fr. William A. Barry offers a lifetime of wisdom and compassion as he leads the reader through the overarching story of God’s relationship with us, the beloved creation. With his characteristic warm and personal style, Fr. Barry invites us to ponder how the events and characters of Scripture relate to us in real time and daily experience. His theme, so prominent in his life’s work as author and spiritual director, is simply this: God desires our friendship and participation in the grand story of grace.

The Mind's Eye

Author: Oliver Sacks
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307594556
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From “the poet laureate of medicine" (The New York Times) and the author of the classic The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat comes a fascinating exploration of the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains cope with the loss of sight by finding rich new forms of perception. “Elaborate and gorgeously detailed.... Again and again, Sacks invites readers to imagine their way into minds unlike their own, encouraging a radical form of empathy.” —Los Angeles Times With compassion and insight, Dr. Oliver Sacks again illuminates the mysteries of the brain by introducing us to some remarkable characters, including Pat, who remains a vivacious communicator despite the stroke that deprives her of speech, and Howard, a novelist who loses the ability to read. Sacks investigates those who can see perfectly well but are unable to recognize faces, even those of their own children. He describes totally blind people who navigate by touch and smell; and others who, ironically, become hyper-visual. Finally, he recounts his own battle with an eye tumor and the strange visual symptoms it caused. As he has done in classics like The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Awakenings, Dr. Sacks shows us that medicine is both an art and a science, and that our ability to imagine what it is to see with another person's mind is what makes us truly human.

Visions

Author: Lisa Compton
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press Inc
ISBN: 1509253637
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
After unleashing the magic of her ancestors, Olivia Osborne finds herself plagued by visions. She will need those new skills and more as she and Silas Branch are thrust back to the case they knew was never finished. Under the moss-covered trees of a small town in Florida exists an ancient evil that hungers for more. Following the death screams of a young girl, Olivia uncovers the secrets of a killer. Larry Wayne Pittman confessed his crimes, but he has one final request before he meets his fate. He has a message for Olivia Osborne that will change her life and unlock her own secrets. Olivia’s visions aren’t an evolution but a side-effect, and she cannot protect what she does not understand.

Horizon

Author: Barry Lopez
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525656219
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIAN From pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.

Liberty from All Masters

Author: Barry C. Lynn
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250240638
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Barry C. Lynn, one of America's preeminent thinkers, provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America’s new monopolies in Liberty from All Masters. "Very few thinkers in recent years have done more to shift the debate in Washington than Barry Lynn." —Franklin Foer Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read “You ain’t the boss of me.” Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. The result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want. The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.