![]() ![]() To this day, Japan's modern ascendancy challenges many assumptions about world history, particularly theories regarding the rise of the west and why the modern world looks the way it does. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Brett Walker, a historian with an eye for science and an ear for language, knows that he and his near-death experience are a synecdoche for the broader issues of disease, memory, selfhood, and history among us all."Ī Concise History of Japan. Fascinating, literate, profound, wondrously variegated, harrowingly personal. "This book is terrific in five ways I can barely list here. JULIA ADENEY THOMAS, author of Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology The result is a rousing defense of history itself in our age of presentism." "In another tour de force, Brett Walker traces the entangled social and biological histories that produced his own medical condition and then uses this lens to show how all our histories are thus entangled. The result is a moving memoir and profound meditation on living within the histories of our body, family, and environment." "A uniquely talented historian fights the disease that may kill him with research, narrative, and empathy. GREGG MITMAN, author of Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes A Family History of Illness is a unique story that brings together personal memoir and medical history with a thoughtful guide and reflection on the craft of history." "A masterful tale, beautifully written, by a highly accomplished historian at his best. NANCY LANGSTON, professor of environmental history, Michigan Tech A Family History of Illness weaves together family histories with the history of science, medical history, and a history of place." He finds that family legacies shape us both physically and symbolically, forming the root of our identity and values, and he urges us to renew our interest in the past or risk misunderstanding ourselves and the world around us. In his own search, Walker soon realizes that this broader scope is more valuable than a strictly medical family history. In this deeply personal narrative, he constructs a history of his body to understand his diagnosis with a serious immunological disorder, weaving together his dying grandfather's sneaking a cigarette in a shed on the family's Montana farm, blood fractionation experiments in Europe during World War II, and nineteenth-century cholera outbreaks that ravaged small American towns as his ancestors were making their way west.Ī Family History of Illness is a gritty historical memoir that examines the body's immune system and microbial composition as well as the biological and cultural origins of memory and history, offering a startling, fresh way to view the role of history in understanding our physical selves. While in the ICU with a near-fatal case of pneumonia, Brett Walker was asked, "Do you have a family history of illness?"-a standard and deceptively simple question that for Walker, a professional historian, took on additional meaning and spurred him to investigate his family's medical past. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. I can only hope that he keeps walking, continuing to show his compassion through the ray of hope that beams onto the human race through his sparkling lens.A Family History of Illness: Memory as Medicine. This man sees the threads that tie us all together, through all time. In the lines of age or the delicacy of youth, in the battle scars and the sparkling eyes, all becomes equally marvelous in the amazing eye of Brett Walker. I see him as kind and loving, full of a capacity to see beauty where few can see it, and reveal it to us all. His images are true marvels, and they express so much about the man himself. ![]() Not a visionary in the ordinary sense, but a true seer, a master in the use of the sense we call vision. if you'd ever wondered what it might be like to see through the eyes of another, and if this another was not some ordinary folk but someone who is a true visionary. Take a step into the world of Brett Walker, but only if you have plenty of time to linger. Not a visionary in the ordinary … Read more ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |