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Mai's experience as a physician and psychiatrist serves as a basis for his analysis. Working from the symptoms described in the medical evidence, Beethoven's letters and those of his friends, and the reports of his physicians, Mai compares how Beethoven's health complaints would have been understood and treated within the medical, political, and social climate of both his time and ours. He discusses Beethoven's terminal illness and the resulting autopsy report to consider the roles of alcohol, lead poisoning (based on the toxic levels in his hair), and syphilis in causing his death.
Beethoven's extraordinary ability to compose great music despite severe health problems, including deafness and depression, has puzzled and inspired. In Diagnosing Genius François Martin Mai looks at the relationship between Beethoven's health and creativity to show how the composer was able to transcend physical and emotional torment to produce some of the most powerful and beautiful music in Western culture.
This book considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find the fields collaborating to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts.
This book looks closely at both Beethoven and the Grosse Fuge, placing both in their historical and social contexts. It considers interesting questions about whether absolute music--music without words--can have meaning and speculates that some works of Western music can evoke synesthesia in listeners--a sense of motion through three-dimensional volumes of space. The author also speculates that Beethoven's long creative dry spell in his late 40s was caused by an extended bout with clinical depression.
Rarely do we see inside the life and mind of a psychiatrist, but that’s exactly what we get in With Hope in My Heart: Musings of a Spirited Psychiatrist. With candor and openness, author François Mai shares how and why he ventured into psychiatry, the lure of academia, and his professional triumphs and troubles along the way. Educated in Apartheid-era South Africa, Mai takes his clinical practice across five countries: South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia, the US, and Canada. Inspired by his time and adventures in these places, as well as his greatest influences, psychiatrists William Sargant and George Engel, this memoir is for a diverse audience. Readers eager to learn more about...
This collection of 19 new essays by 21 authors from the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia and India focuses on contemporary film and television (1989 to the present) from those countries as well as from China, Korea, Thailand and France. The essays are divided into two parts. The first includes critical readings of narrative film and television. The second includes contributions on documentaries, biopics and autobiographically-informed films. The book as a whole is designed to be accessible to readers new to disability studies while also contributing significantly to the field. An introduction gives background on disability studies and appendices provide a filmography and a list of suggested reading.
The global political situation is increasingly volatile, and Hera and her sisters are sealed off from the rest of the world in southern Nevada. She is still tormented by her parents’ decision to genetically modify the brains of their twelve daughters—and by her own agreement to allow a similar procedure to be used on a much larger group of human embryos. That group of engineered embryos has become one thousand young people just turning eighteen, and the gender politics among them is threatening to ruin Hera’s gamble on a new beginning for human society. The Priesthood of Science envisions a future in which scientific research is confined to facilities hidden away from public view and where there is a prohibition against turning scientific discoveries into new technologies in order to keep a world torn apart by religious fanaticism and ethnic hatred under control.
In Planet Beethoven, Mina Yang makes the compelling case that classical music in the twenty-first century is just as vibrant and relevant as ever—but with significant changes that give us insight into the major cultural shifts of our day. Perusing events, projects, programs, writings, musicians, and compositions, Yang shines a spotlight on the Western art music tradition. The book covers an array of topics, from the use of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” in YouTube clips and hip-hop, to the marketing claims of Baby Einstein products, and the new forms of music education introduced by Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. While the book is global in its outlook, each ch...
Gay never recorded an album, never won a Juno. His music existed in the moment, appreciated by the few who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. For the rest of us, those late-night jam sessions in a shack in an alley on the bad side of Edmonton never happened. We never got to hear him play the Cole Porter songs he loved with Carlos Montoya, never got to watch the ashes build dangerously on the end of his menthol cigarette. And when Frank Gay died, only the guitar players gently wept. — Shelley Youngblut Until his death in 1982, Edmonton luthier and guitarist Frank Gay built guitars for several famous musicians, including country stars Johnny Cash, Don Gibson, Webb ...