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"How Doctors Think" by Jerome Groopman, M.D. Length: 10 hours and 30 min. ISBN: 978-1-4001-5425-8 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

A New Yorker staff writer, best-selling author, and professor at Harvard Medical School unravels the mystery of how doctors figure out the best treatments - or fail to do so. This book describes the warning signs of flawed medical thinking and offers intelligent questions patients can ask.

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within 12 seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong - with catastrophic consequences.

In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. He explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can, with our help, avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can have a profound impact on our health.

Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best physicians, and his own experiences as a doctor and patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems.

How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of 21st-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

Tags: how doctors think, jerome groopman, m.d., science, doctor, patient, diagnosis, symptoms, medical errors

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"The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great" by Susan Casey Length: 10 hours and 51 min. ISBN: 1-4159-2029-X New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Travel 30 miles north, south, or east of San Francisco city hall and you’ll be engulfed in a landscape of thick traffic, fast enterprise, and $6 cappuccinos. Venture 30 miles due west, however, and you will find yourself on what is virtually another planet: a spooky cluster of rocky islands called the Farallones.

Journalist Susan Casey was in her living room when she first glimpsed this strange place and its resident sharks, their dark fins swirling around a tiny boat in a documentary. These great whites were the alphas among alphas, the narrator said, some of them topping 18 feet in length, and each fall they congregated here off the northern California coast. That so many of these magnificent and elusive animals lived in the 415 area code, crisscrossing each other under the surface like jets stacked in a holding pattern, seemed stunningly improbable and irresistible. Casey knew she had to see them for herself.

Within a matter of months she was in a 17-foot Boston Whaler, being hoisted up a cliff to face onto the barren surface of Southeast Farallon Island, part of the group known to 19th-century sailors as the “Devil’s Teeth”. There she joined the two biologists who study the sharks, bunking down in the island’s one habitable building, a haunted, 120-year-old house spackled with lichen and gull guano. Less than 48 hours later she had her first encounter with the famous, terrifying jaws and was instantly hooked. Curiosity yielded to obsession, and when the opportunity arose to return for a longer stay she jumped at it. But as Casey readied herself for shark season, she had no way of preparing for what she would find among the dangerous, forgotten islands.

The Devil’s Teeth offers a rare glimpse into the lives of nature’s most mysterious predators, and of those who follow them. Here is a vivid dispatch from an otherworldly outpost, a story of crossing the boundary between society and an untamed place where humans are neither wanted nor needed.

Tags: the devil’s teeth: a true story of obsession and survival among america’s great white sharks, susan casey, science, travel and adventure, a true story of obsession and survival among america’s great white sharks, farallones islands, san francisco, california

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"The Universe in a Single Atom" by His Holiness the Dalai Lama Length: 6 hours ISBN: 0-7393-2265-6 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Gallileo, Copernicus, Newton, Niels Bohr, Einstein. Their insights shook our perception of who we are and where we stand in the world and in their wake have left an uneasy co-existence: science vs. religion, faith vs. empirical enquiry. Which is the keeper of truth? Which is the true path to understanding reality?

After 40 years of study with some of the greatest scientific minds as well as a lifetime of meditative, spiritual, and philosophical study, the Dalai Lama presents a brilliant analysis of why both disciplines must be pursued in order to arrive at a complete picture of the truth. Science shows us ways of interpreting the physical world, while spirituality helps us cope with reality. But the extreme of either is impoverishing. The belief that all is reducible to matter and energy leaves out a huge range of human experience: emotions, yearnings, compassion, culture. At the same time, holding unexamined spiritual beliefs, beliefs that are contradicted by evidence, logic, and experience, can lock us into fundamentalist cages.

Through an examination of Darwinism and karma, quantum mechanics and philosophical insight into the nature of reality, neurobiology and the study of consciousness, the Dalai Lama draws significant parallels between contemplative and scientific examination of reality. “I believe that spirituality and science are complementary but different investigative approaches with the same goal of seeking the truth,” His Holiness writes. “In this, there is much each may learn from the other, and together they may contribute to expanding the horizon of human knowledge and wisdom.”

This breathtakingly personal examination is a tribute to the Dalai Lama’s teachers, both of science and spirituality. The legacy of this book is a vision of the world in which our different approaches to understanding ourselves, our universe, and one another can be brought together in the service of humanity.

This audio includes an interview with Richard Gere.

Tags: the universe in a single atom, his holiness the dalai lama, arts & leisure, nonfiction, science, spirituality, science, religion, evolution, creationism, intelligent design, evolution, darwinism

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"Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior" by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson Length: 11 hours and 47 min. ISBN: 1-400-15146-5 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

How is Animals in Translation different from every other animal book ever published? Animals in Translation is like no other animal book because of Temple Grandin. As an animal scientist and a person with autism, her professional training and personal history have created a perspective like no other thinker in the field, and this is her exciting, groundbreaking view of the intersection of autism and animal.

Unlike other well-known writers in the field of animal behavior, Temple Grandin is an animal scientist who has devoted the last 30 years of her life to the study of animals. Animals in Translation is the culmination of that life’s work, a book whose sweep is huge, including just about anything that gallops, trots, slithers, walks, or flies.

Temple Grandin is like no other author on the subject of animals because of her training and because of her autism; understanding animals is in her blood and her bones.

Animals in Translation…

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"The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery and Evidence That Could Change History" by Simcha Jacobovici Length: 9 hours and 24 min. ISBN: 0-0613-6400-2 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

The Jesus Family Tomb tells the story of what may very well be the greatest archaeological find of all time: the discovery and investigation of the tomb belonging to Jesus’ family. The tomb in question houses ossuaries (bone boxes) with inscriptions bearing the names of Jesus of Nazareth, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Judas, the son of Jesus. This crypt has been overlooked and ignored for years and exists today under a patio just outside of Jerusalem. The authors have tracked down the location and been granted unequaled access to inspect the findings within the tomb. The artifacts were found, recorded, and catalogued by professional archaeologists in a controlled setting. There is no question of their authenticity.

This is a story that is destined to grab international headlines and raise fundamental questions about the origins of Christianity. The question will undoubtedly arise: are these inscriptions referring to a Jesus and Mary other than the Jesus and Mary of the Gospels? To this end, the listener participates in one of the most controversial investigations of an archaeological find in history. Starting with critical DNA testing from the human remains, the authors, with the help of top scholars and industry leaders, walk us through the actual timeline of the discovery, including an interview with the man who stumbled across the original unearthing of the tomb in 1980. They also detail the paleographic analysis of the ossuaries; analyze the symbology of the tomb and the ossuaries; reveal the importance of the names, using both the New Testament and Apocrypha; and evaluate the patina residue and the statistical probabilities of the cluster of names in the specific location.

A fascinating combination of history, archaeology, and theology, the revelations in this audiobook will change the way we think about God, religion, and everything we have learned about the life and death of Jesus.

Tags: the jesus family tomb: the discovery and evidence that could change history, simcha jacobovici, religion & spirituality, science, ossuary, bone box, archaeology, crypt, inscriptions, dna