Washoe County Library System

Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Gawande asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

The first book to open up a real conversation about aging. What has the experience of getting older felt like for you? It seems that life's milestones pass by in a flash: graduating from school, landing your first job, getting married, having kids. Most people look forward to these events and have some expectations about what each life milestone will be like. But what about when you get older? How can you continue to live fully in your sixties, seventies,...

" A revolutionary examination of why we age, what it means for our health, and how we just might be able to fight it. In Cracking the Aging Code, theoretical biologist Josh Mitteldorf and award-winning writer and ecological philosopher Dorion Sagan reveal that evolution and aging are even more complex and breathtaking than we originally thought. Using meticulous multidisciplinary science, as well as reviewing the history of our understanding about...

In the past century, average life expectancies have nearly doubled, and today, for the first time in human history, many people have a realistic chance of living to eighty or beyond. As life expectancy increases, Americans need accurate, scientifically grounded information so that they can take full responsibility for their own later years. In The Art and Science of Aging Well, Mark E. Williams, M.D., discusses the remarkable advances that medical...

This course explores the science and mystery of the human nervous system, from essential neurochemical and neurobiological processes to the psychological and social constructs they are thought to produce.