Do No Harm: Stories of Life and Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh
Price: Rs 638
What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially lifesaving operation when it all goes wrong?
With astonishing compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon’s life. Do No Harm provides unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life’s most difficult decisions. Painfully honest about the mistakes that can ‘wreck’ a brain, exquisitely attuned to the tense and transient bond between doctor and patient, and hilariously impatient of hospital management, Marsh draws us deep into medicine’s most difficult art and lifts our spirits.
Good Reads
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren
Price: Rs 638
With half a million copies in print, How to Read a Book is the best and most successful guide to reading comprehension for the general reader, completely rewritten and updated with new material. Originally published in 1940, this book is a rare phenomenon, a living classic that introduces and elucidates the various levels of reading and how to achieve them—from elementary reading, through systematic skimming and inspectional reading, to speed reading. Readers will learn when and how to “judge a book by its cover,” and also how to X-ray it, read critically, and extract the author’s message from the text. Also included is instruction in the different techniques that work best for reading particular genres, such as practical books, imaginative literature, plays, poetry, history, science and mathematics, philosophy and social science works. Finally, the authors offer a recommended reading list and supply reading tests you can use measure your own progress in reading skills, comprehension, and speed.
Gold Mountains Blues by Ling Zhang
Price: Rs 798
In the epic storytelling tradition of Amy Tan and Jiang Rong comes Gold Mountain Blues. This rich saga chronicles the lives of five generations of a Chinese family from Guandong Province who are transformed by the promise of a better life in Gold Mountain, the Chinese name for Canada’s majestic West Coast. In 1879, 16-year-old Fong Tak-Fat boards a ship to Canada determined to make a life for himself and support his family back home. He will blast rocks for the Pacific Railway, launder linens for his countrymen, and save every penny he makes to reunite his family—because his heart remains in China. From the 1860s to the present day, Gold Mountain Blues relates the struggles and sacrifices of the laborers who built the Canadian Pacific Railway and who laid the groundwork for the evolution of the modern Chinese-Canadian identity. A novel about family, hope, and sacrifice, Gold Mountain Blues is a marvelous saga from a remarkable new Canadian voice.
