Hello cowboys & vampires!

Clark and Kathleen are putting the final touches on the fourth book in The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection. The authors have commissioned an artist to design the cover of this final book chronicling Tucker and Lizzie’s opposites-attract love story arc as an homage to the vintage 1999 cover, but within the aesthetic of the current covers. Published (Llewellyn) before the e-book revolution, the 1999 now-first edition was print only. Tough to tell in the image below, but the blood and boot design were raised/textured and given a shiny treatment. This original book has become a bit of a collector’s item. Stay tuned. We’ll share the new 1999-inspired cover and book title soon. Publication expected in early 2016.

Superficially, these three books seem little alike yet there is a connective thread: a cold hard look at scientific dishonesty. By this we don’t mean data-manipulating, ethical or other types of individual malfeasance, but rather, in these pages is a willingness to do what most of our scientific culture is unwilling (or unable) to do: undertake a type of meaningful self-reflection in the face of a reality that cries out for change. We grouped these three book reviews together because each, by intent or accident, reflects on a scientific theme with rare honesty and, in some ways, courage.

Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves by Laurel Braitman. Humans are lucky animals. We have a special skill that has guaranteed our survival: we can complain. More specifically, we can vocalize our thoughts. And because we talk, we can complain about the things that bother us, like mental health issues, and seek remedy. Non-speaking animals, lacking this one slender skill, seem to suffer from many of the same mental health problems as humans — PTSD, abandonment issues, sexual dysfunction, suicidal thoughts — but since they can’t complain, they wind up stuck in cages and zoos and pens and farms and logging camps (elephants) and eventually, for some, on dinner plates — while suffering from extreme mental health issues. Read the full review>>

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh. Ever wanted to see inside the brain? Did you ever want to touch that gelatinous mess and feel warm blood squirting all over your starched shirt, knowing that the next squiggly thing you sever, solder, extricate or drop will be the difference between life, death or some excruciating in-between coma-like existence for the anesthetized human container beneath your hands? Well then, this book is definitely for you. The author gently welcomes the reader into the foreign land of neurosurgery, whose citizens are of a decidedly unique temperament.  Read the full review>> 

The Creativity Crisis: Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility by Roberta Ness. A brave book, gentle without too much overt criticism, but forthright about the human forces restraining science, especially biomedical science, in the U.S. Turns out it’s a host of things that individually seem inconsequential or at least manageable, but during the last few decades, these elements have managed to blend themselves together into a frighteningly strong and obstructive swill that now slows down, even poisons, scientific outcomes, devaluing public investment. Read the full review>>

An eerie similarity of hands.

An enumerated essay about six pop mythical creatures that are really cultural environmental indicators in disguise, thus illuminating the portentous power of gothic fiction to reflect (create?) a collective state of cultural awareness on important issues of the day. SHAZAM! 

One: Big Foot aficionados (and their Yeti-loving cousins) are not crazy. Data suggest their obsession reflects a naïve hopefulness that an intelligent, gentle, human-like species could still live freely, deep in the primeval forest, having cunningly escaped the steady oppressive march of human civilization and its relentless takeover of nature. The back-of-the-envelope monster metadata analysis being reported here first gained momentum … Read more about BF and his pals >>продвижение

Without cancer,
without funerals,
poets would fall
mostly silent.
So reliant on the obvious,
the black and white
transitions
from health to sick,
from life to rubble.
All but hushed by the
challenge
of finding the transcendent,
the incandescent,
in the every
day.

And also in the hands of their mothers
and fathers.

As if holding on to
the past matters.

Art from “makemebark” located in the Maldives.deeo.ru