More than simply a history of the bow and arrow, The Lightening Stick brings together a broad range of significant people and events, spiritual usages, medicinal treatments, and an unusual array of subject matter related to the weapon itself. Henrietta Stockel conveys a host of information derived from primary documents and provides readers with a fascinating book. Her descriptive storytelling—serious, humorous, and even gory at times—takes the reader from modern uses of bows and arrows (including a previously little-known incident in the atomic city of Los Alamos, New Mexico) to an early era of western history, before guns changed the frontier forever.

  The perils of aging are many, but the debilitating effects of serious illness loom large. In this stirring memoir, readers will discover a man who improved the lives of many arthritis sufferers before himself succumbing to a cruel debilitating disease. The Man behind the Mask tells the story of Thomas Mallory, who was inspired to become a doctor after undergoing surgery for a high school football injury. He went on to become a renowned surgeon and a pioneer in joint replacement. In 2002, his successful career came to an abrupt halt when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

            Mallory was one of the first surgeons in the United States to see the potential for joint replacement technology, and in this memoir he describes not only the nuances of introducing hip replacement surgery but also the systems that he established to make it a highly successful operation. He tells how he overcame initial resistance to the procedure and became a respected teacher of the technology, training many surgeons who went on to successful careers, lecturing about his procedure around the world, and also seeing VIP patients who journeyed to Ohio just to be operated on by him.

            As a pioneer in this type of operation, Mallory first recognized the value of using prosthetic innovation and development. He became a proponent of modularity in joint replacement surgery, which allowed a surgeon to customize a prosthesis to a patient’s joint in the operating room. His innovations, along with those of Dr. William Head, resulted in the introduction in 1983 of the Mallory-Head Hip System—a technology still in use today and one that has offered relief to thousands of patients.

            Tracing the joys and sorrows of his own career, Mallory dispels the myth that surgeons are emotionally invulnerable and cold. He offers his perspective on the pursuit of medicine as a profession, on the doctor-patient relationship, and on litigious challenges to physicians. He also commends the benefits of family and leisure and the blessing of life in general while offering insight into the management of an incurable disease.

            In our skeptical era, Thomas Mallory is a shining example of a prominent scientist who has maintained his faith in God throughout the highs and lows of life. The Man behind the Mask is an inspiring account for fellow professionals and general readers, as well as for those who have benefited from the procedures he introduced.

In this reliable guide, leading eye care experts:
—explain how healthy eyes work
—describe various eye diseases, including pink eye, cataract, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy
—provide up-to-date information on eye surgery, including refractive, laser, and cosmetic

For each eye problem, the authors describe in simple, straightforward language
—what it is
—the symptoms
—what, if anything, you can do to prevent it
—when to call the doctor
—the treatment
—the likelihood of recovery

All about Your Eyes includes a glossary of technical terms and, following each entry, links to web sites where further information may be found.

A thirteenth-century treatise on the theory and practice of ophthalmology, this unique work provides a window on what passed for medical knowledge of the eye during the late Middle Ages. Although little is known of the author, Benevenutus Grassus, he seems to have roamed Italy in the early thirteenth century as a medical practitioner specializing in diseases of the eye.

One out of every eight people between the ages of 18 and 67 in the United States has a hearing loss, estimated as 12 percent of the working-age population. Sound Sense: Living and Learning with Hearing Loss addresses the acute need of these people to function at the highest level in these income-earning years, the longest phase in their lives. In nine pointed chapters, author Sara Laufer Batinovich, who also has lost her hearing, shares her experience and knowledge in turning every challenge into an opportunity to become one’s best self-advocate.

Batinovich begins in the workplace, advising on winning a job, keeping it, and developing a long-term career, plus how to reduce stress and establish fulfilling professional relationships with colleagues. She offers tips on communication ranging from having sales people face you for easier speechreading to parsing boarding announcements at airports and play-by-play at ballparks. Her practical handbook also provides step-by-step guidance for getting a hearing aid or a cochlear implant and finding one’s way through prickly insurance claim mazes.

Sound Sense features information on finding a service dog, securing legally mandated accommodations for continuing education, tips on exercise and health, and even sensitive suggestions on strengthening personal relationships. Batinovich’s vivacious style and her own anecdotes add an upbeat, genuine sensibility to her book’s value as a positive guide to living with hearing loss.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand begins this wide-ranging volume with an essay that extols diversity and warns of the dangers of modifying the human genome. Nora Groce reviews the ways that societies have defined disability and creates an interpretive framework for discussing the relationship between culture and disability.

     In essays devoted to historical perspective, Brian H. Greenwald comments upon the real “toll” taken by A. G. Bell’s insistence upon oralism, while Joseph J. Murray weighs the nineteenth-century debate over whether deaf-deaf marriages should be encouraged. John S. Schuchman’s chilling account of deafness and eugenics in the Nazi era adds wrenching reinforcement to the impetus to include disabled people in genetics debates.

     Mark Willis offers an intensely personal reflection on the complexities of genetic alteration, addressing both his heart condition and his blindness in surprisingly different ways. Anna Middleton extends Willis’s concepts in her discussion of couples currently considering the use of genetic knowledge and technology to select for or against a gene that causes deafness.

     In the part on the science of genetics, Orit Dagan, Karen B. Avraham, Kathleen S. Arnos, and Arti Pandya clarify the choices presented by genetic engineering, and geneticist Walter E. Nance emphasizes the importance of science in offering individuals knowledge from which they can fashion their own decisions. In the concluding section, Christopher Krentz raises moral questions about the ever-continuing search for human perfection, and Michael Bérubé argues that disability should be considered democratically to ensure full participation of disabled people in all decisions that might affect them.

In graduating from Gallaudet University, finding a job in Washington, D.C., and starting a family with her college sweetheart, Kitty Fischer tacitly abandoned the Louisiana Cajun culture that had exposed her to little more than prejudice and misery as a child. Upon discovering that she suffered from Usher syndrome (a genetic condition that causes both deafness and blindness), however, Fischer began an unlikely journey toward reclaiming her heritage. She and Cathryn Carroll tell the story of her heroic struggle and cultural odyssey in Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindness.

“By this time Mama knew I was ‘not right,’” Fischer says of her early childhood. “She knew the real words for ‘not right,’ too, though she never said those words. I was deaf and dumb.” Initially Fischer’s parents turned to folk healers to try and “cure” their daughter’s deafness, but an aunt’s fortunate discovery of the Louisiana School for the Deaf would rescue Fischer from misunderstanding and introduce her to sign language and Deaf culture. She weathered the school’'s experiments with oralism and soon rose to the top of her class, ultimately leaving Louisiana for the academic promise of Gallaudet.

While in college, Fischer met and married her future husband, Lance, a Jewish Deaf man from Brooklyn, New York, and each landed jobs close to their alma mater. After the birth of their first child, however, Fischer could no longer ignore her increasing tunnel vision. Doctors quickly confirmed that Fischer had Usher syndrome.

While Fischer struggled to come to terms with her condition, the high incidence of Usher syndrome among Cajun people led her to re-examine her cultural roots. “Could I still be me, Catherine Hoffpauir Fischer, had I not been born of a mix that codes for Usher syndrome?” she asks. “To some extent, the history of my people explains the constitution of my genes and the way my life has unfolded.” Today Fischer prospers, enjoying her time with family and friends and celebrating the Deaf, Cajun, Blind, and Jewish cultures that populate her life. Her lively story will resonate with anyone who recognizes the arduous journey toward claiming an identity.

Part ethnography and part historical study, The Artificial Ear is based on interviews with researchers who were pivotal in the early development and implementation of the new technology. Through an analysis of the scientific and clinical literature, Stuart Blume reconstructs the history of artificial hearing from its conceptual origins in the 1930s, to the first attempt at cochlear implantation in Paris in the 1950s, and to the widespread clinical application of the "bionic ear" since the 1980s.

The cochlear implant debate has changed, as evidenced in this cogent collection that presents 13 chapters by 20 experts, including several who communicate through sign language but also utilize cochlear implants. The impetus for this change stems from recognition that both visual and aural input can enhance the education of deaf children.

Divided into four sections, Cochlear Implants: Evolving Perspectives first focuses on the impact of implants in the Deaf community. Chapters in this section examine the issues driving the cochlear implant debate, the ethics of genetic engineering, experiences of implanted adult deaf signers, reflections of deaf mothers who have had their children implanted, and the effects of implants on deaf identity. The second section delves into the mechanics of bimodal processing, including listening strategies that can benefit signing children with cochlear implants. The third section surveys combined aural/visual educational approaches, such as teaching implanted children in an ASL/English bilingual classroom, and applying auditory rehabilitation to a signed communication context.

The final section challenges readers to reframe the debate first by exploring sensory politics, then by envisioning an emerging world that requires the Deaf community to connect with it to secure its future. With this information, readers will reach their own conclusions about cochlear implants and auditory and visual approaches to the mastery of both spoken and signed languages.

With the rate of cochlear implantation reaching 80% to 90% of all deaf children, some as young as five months old, Surgical Consent: Bioethics and Cochlear Implantation arrives at a critical juncture. This comprehensive collection features essays by Priscilla Alderson, Inger Lise Skog Hansen, Hilde Haualand, volume editor Linda Komesaroff, Paddy Ladd, Harlan Lane, Karen Lloyd, Eithne Mills, Paal Richard Peterson, Gunilla Preisler, Kristina Svartholm, and Michael Uniacke. These worldwide renowned ethicists, educators, and Deaf leaders express their diverse perspectives on the bioethics of childhood cochlear implantation according to their discipline and a number of themes of inquiry: human rights, medical and social ethics, psychology, education, globalization, identity, life pathways, democracy, media, law, and biotechnology.

Drawing on current research, this volume presents the varying reactions around the globe to the high rate of implantation. These views contrast sharply with the medical perspective of deafness overwhelmingly promoted through the media and by the cochlear implantation industry. At the same time, the contributors aim to disrupt the binaries that have long dominated the field of deafness — speech versus sign, instruction through speech and sign systems versus bilingual education, and medical intervention versus cultural membership in the Deaf community.

Surgical Consent begins and ends with the voices of Deaf people. Their articulate and, at times, raw insights clearly delineate the issues of power, positioning, and minority-majority group relations that are inherent in the dominant hearing culture’s understanding of diversity and globalization.