Search results for ""Author Wellcome Collection""

"INFORMATIVE AND ORIGINAL" Guardian, 'This month's best paperbacks' We've become used to thinking of plants as things for us to use: as food, tools, resources, or just as an attractive background to our own lives. But it's time to change our minds. New research shows that plants can think, plan - and may even have memories. We share our planet with beings whose potential we have only glimpsed. Featuring the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Susie Orbach and Merlin Sheldrake, This Book is a Plant will be your handbook to the new reality: showing you a pathway to completely reimagine your relationship with a different kind of natural world. Delve into a world of moss and fungi: Sheila Watt-Cloutier transports us to the Arctic spring, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan discovers the pleasures of painting trees, and Rebecca Tamás puts roots down through earth and soil. This Book is a Plant is made from paper: it was once part of a tree. But it's also a seed: the first shoots of a radical new way of seeing the world around you. "AN ECLECTIC ANTHOLOGY GUARANTEED TO MAKE THE HEARTS OF EARTH LOVERS BEAT FASTER" Metro

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We've become used to thinking of plants as things for us to use: as food, tools, resources, or just as an attractive background to our own lives. But it's time to change our minds. New research shows that plants can think, plan - and may even have memories. We share our planet with beings whose potential we have only glimpsed. Featuring the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Susie Orbach and Merlin Sheldrake, This Book is a Plant will be your handbook to the new reality: showing you a pathway to completely reimagine your relationship with a different kind of natural world. Delve into a world of moss and fungi: Sheila Watt-Cloutier transports us to the Arctic spring, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan discovers the pleasures of painting trees, and Rebecca Tamás puts roots down through earth and soil. This Book is a Plant is made from paper: it was once part of a tree. But it's also a seed: the first shoots of a radical new way of seeing the world around you. Featuring stunning illustrations by Eduardo Navarro, and accompanying a major 2022 Wellcome Collection exhibition, Rooted Beings.

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'A spectacular treasury of treats. Page after page of utter joy: I can’t tear my eyes away' - Derren BrownIn The Spectacle of Illusion, professional magician-turned experimental psychologist Dr. Matthew L. Tompkins investigates the arts of deception as practised and popularised by mesmerists, magicians and psychics since the early 18th century. Organised thematically within a broadly chronological trajectory, this compelling book explores how illusions perpetuated by magicians and fraudulent mystics can not only deceive our senses but also teach us about the inner workings of our minds. Indeed, modern scientists are increasingly turning to magic tricks to develop new techniques to examine human perception, memory and belief. Beginning by discussing mesmerism and spiritualism, the book moves on to consider how professional magicians such as John Nevil Maskelyne and Harry Houdini engaged with these movements – particularly how they set out to challenge and debunk paranormal claims. It also relates the interactions between magicians, mystics and scientists over the past 200 years, and reveals how the researchers who attempted to investigate magical and paranormal phenomena were themselves deceived, and what this can teach us about deception. Highly illustrated throughout with entertaining and bizarre drawings, double-exposure spirit photographs and photographs of spoon-bending from hitherto inaccessible and un-mined archives, including the Wellcome Collection, the Harry Price Library, the Society for Physical Research, and last but not least, the Magic Circle’s closely guarded collection, the book also features newly commissioned photography of planchettes, rapping boards, tilting tables, ectoplasm, automata and illusion boxes. Concluding with a modern-day analysis of the science of magic and illusion, analysing surprisingly weird phenomena such as ideomotor action, sleep paralysis, choice blindness and the psychology of misdirection, this unnerving volume highlights how unreliable our minds can be, and how complicit they can be in the perpetuation of illusions.

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The history of selling sex is a hidden one, its practitioners a ‘damnable crew’ pushed to the margins of history. Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts redresses the balance, revealing the history of sex for sale, from medieval back street to Wild West saloon, and from the brothel to state bedroom. This enthralling history is brought to life by Kate Lister’s witty and authoritative text, and illuminated by a rich archive of photographs, artworks and objects. Structured thematically in broadly chronological order, the book introduces a lively cast of complex and entertaining characters operating in an array of different periods and settings. The Mesopotamian harlot Shamhat was powerful and respected, able to civilize the wild man Enkidu through her charms. In medieval London Elizabeth Moryng serviced clergy under the guise of an embroidery business, though was eventually jailed for being a prolific procuress and bawd. In Renaissance Venice the courtesan Veronica Franco published her poetry, rubbed shoulders with royalty and founded a charity for other courtesans. In the hedonistic floating world of Edo, Japan, kabuki actresses and then geishas entertained and pleasured their patrons. Three men were hanged in 18th-century London for buggery after being found in the Molly House of Margaret Clap. And at the turn of the century, in New Orleans, Lulu White ran Mahogany Hall, a four-storey building that housed up to forty sex workers. Lister’s illuminating tales invite readers to look, listen and reconsider everything they thought they knew about the world’s oldest profession.With 450 illustrations in colour

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