Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Maladies of Empire - How...

  Jim Downs

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  Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of London's 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence Nightingale's contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War transformed hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge. 
   
   
   
  Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjects—conscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. 
   
   
   
  The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.

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  Arthashastra or The Playbook of...

  Chanakya

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  Truly radical "Machiavellianism", in the popular sense of that word, is classically expressed in Indian literature in the Arthashastra of Kautilya (written long before the birth of Christ, ostensibly in the time of Chandragupta): compared to it, Machiavelli's The Prince is harmless.— Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919)Chanakya's treatise, written while turning a farmhand into the emperor of the largest empire India had ever seen, focuses on how to manage an empire, covering everything from domestic policy and personal rights to assassination and the dirtier arts of politics. This is not, as with Plato’s Republic, a work of theory. Chanakya’s guidance is entirely practical, and is based on both his education and his experience building an empire. It lacks the philosophical ponderings and moralizing of its equivalent Western works (such as The Prince, The Republic or Leviathan) and instead focuses on how one deals with the messiness of the world in practice.People will occasionally refer to Chanakya as an Indian Machiavelli, but this does some discredit to Chanakya. The Prince is a satire, and focused around exposing the tactics and inhumanity of Cesare Borgia. Arthashastra is a manual for every aspect of statecraft, and while it deals in the unethical it does so only because that is, after all is said and done, one of the options available to a ruler.If you're after a totally pragmatic analysis of leadership, stripped of moralising and focused on what works and how to deal with real-world issues, this is the book for you.

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  The Vital Spark - How the...

  Anthony Halliday

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  Contemporary scientifically-informed culture investigates the phenomenal world revealed to our mind, senses and technical instruments. Non-duality looks within to the nature of the experiencing subject. Both spring from the need to know, grow and fulfil the supreme potential of human beings, who find the universe apparently manifesting consciousness as themselves. Non-duality offers a path of enquiry into the metaphysical questions underlying physics, and scientific discoveries shed light on what is universal and essential in the non-dual teachings to be found at the heart of all the great wisdom traditions.

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  A Historian in Gaza

  Jean-Pierre Filiu

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  Jean-Pierre Filiu, acclaimed historian of Gaza, is intimately familiar with the land's people and places; he speaks the local dialect. But nothing prepared him for what he encountered there in December 2024. This is his unforgettable, unbearably intimate account of one month in a place shattered by Israel's all-out war.When the historian returned to Gaza, he arrived under circumstances unimaginably different from his many past visits since 1980: only a limited number of convoys were allowed into the Strip, and he was one of the few humanitarians able to enter, this time by night. He remained inside for thirty-three days, and emerged determined to bear witness to the devastation—to the Gazans fighting simply to live, every single day.Filiu's haunting portrait of a land betrayed is a grim work of war reportage, documented with the acuity of a historian; and a lyrical narrative of human suffering, and human dignity.

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  Screen Damage - The Dangers of...

  Michel Desmurget

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  All forms of recreational digital consumption—whether on smartphones, tablets, game consoles, or TVs—have skyrocketed in the younger generations. From the age of two, children in the West clock up more than 2.5 hours of screen time a day; by the time they reach thirteen, it's more than seven hours a day. Added up over the first eighteen years of life, this is the equivalent of almost thirty school years, or fifteen years of full-time employment. 
   
   
   
  Most media experts do not seem overly concerned about this situation: children are adaptable, they say, they are "digital natives," their brains have changed and screens make them smarter. But other specialists—including some pediatricians, psychiatrists, teachers, and speech therapists—dispute these claims, and many parents worry about the long-term consequences of their children's intensive exposure to screens. 
   
   
   
  Michel Desmurget, a leading neuroscientist, has carefully weighed up the scientific evidence concerning the impact of the digital activities of our children and adolescents, and his assessment does not make for happy listening: he shows that these activities have significant detrimental consequences in terms of the health, behavior, and intellectual abilities of young people, and strongly affect their academic outcomes.

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  Harriet Tubman - The American...

  Kelly Mass

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  Harriet Tubman (March 10, 1822-- March tenth, 1913) was an abolitionist and political activist in the United States. Tubman, who was born into slavery, got away and went on to free around 70 enslaved people, which includes family members and good friends, through the Underground Rail Road, a network of antislavery activists and safe houses. She worked for the Union Army as an armed scout and spy throughout the American Civil War. Tubman was an activist in the women's suffrage movement in her last years. 
  Tubman was chained as a kid in Dorchester County, Maryland, and was maltreated and whipped by her different masters. She got a horrible head injury as a kid when an angered overseer tossed a very big metal weight at another shackled individual, but it struck her instead. Lightheadedness, pain, and hypersomnia were all signs of the damage, which she experienced for the remainder of her life. 
  Tubman started having odd visions and extreme bad nightmares after her injuries, which she credited to divine forewarnings. She ended up being earnestly spiritual because of these experiences, which she coupled with her Methodist childhood. 
  Slavery in those days was a serious issue. Harriet Tubman’s tragic but heroic story, in this historical context, is definitely worth studying.

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