Word: wisdoms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Life is full of paradoxes, and Harvard life is no exception. From sophomores whose very name combines folly and wisdom to the College itself, which aspires to be both elite and democratic. Recently, I discovered a paradox useful to all who are stricken with my favorite disease: acute procrastination. After checking my e-mail every 30 seconds for an hour, popping microwave popcorn, running Yahoo searches to complete my collection of start-up sounds from "The Princess Bride" and, of course, taking naps--all to avoid studying for exams--I needed a new way to procrastinate...
Before I came to Harvard, my impressions of the College consisted of a quick tour through the Old Yard on a summer day marked by thunderstorm, a glance through the pages of The Harvard Book, the pop wisdom of numerous college guides and my father's tales of sherry in Eliot House. Having spent four years here, thunderstorms have become commonplace, The Harvard Book has sat dusty on the shelf, the advice in the guidebooks has long since fled my mind and I have yet to see most of Eliot House or its mythical sherry. So much for first impressions...
...color and disorder"; a father and daughter camp under "the quickening wounds of a million stars." A refrigerator coughs "like a four-pack-a-day smoker," and nothing seems impossible, not even a man killed by a hurricane-blown avocado. Drawing on the inheritance of an almost folkloric wisdom, Garcia is unafraid of suggesting that passion is "a frail interlude between the prosperities of loss...
What happens during life's final moments was the subject of Sherwin B. Nuland's award-winning How We Die (1994). Now, in The Wisdom of the Body (Knopf; 395 pages; $26.95), Yale's distinguished surgeon and bioethicist presents a kind of prequel: an anatomy of human life, vividly illustrated by case histories from his wide operating-room experience. The result is a book--part basic textbook, part memoir and meditation--that is wholly secular yet sublimely uplifting. Although not religious in a formal sense, Nuland is overwhelmed with awe at how the human body works. As he writes...
...Wisdom of the Body perks up considerably in its accounts of medical case histories. Some of them have the adrenaline-charged force of a Grisham page turner. In his opening chapter, Nuland writes of Margaret Hansen, 42, who was rushed to the emergency room of St. Raphael's hospital in New Haven, Conn., for treatment of what the resident gynecologist thought was a ruptured tubal pregnancy. An abdominal incision that spattered the operating room with Hansen's blood proved him wrong. By chance, Nuland was checking on two patients at St. Raphael's when the loudspeaker crackled an urgent plea...