Health Studies

This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture.

What causes a child to grow up gay or straight? In this book, neuroscientist Simon LeVay summarizes a wealth of scientific evidence that points to one inescapable conclusion: Sexual orientation results primarily from an interaction between genes, sex hormones, and the cells of the developing body and brain. LeVay helped create this field in 1991 with a much-publicized study in Science, where he reported on a difference in the brain structure between gay and straight men. Since then, an entire scientific discipline has sprung up around the quest for a biological explanation of sexual orientation. In this book, LeVay provides a clear explanation of where the science stands today, taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of laboratories that specialize in genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and family demographics. He describes, for instance, how researchers have manipulated the sex hormone levels of animals during development, causing them to mate preferentially with animals of their own gender. LeVay also reports on the prevalence of homosexual behavior among wild animals, ranging from Graylag geese to the Bonobo chimpanzee.

Firefighters are the heroes we need in times of emergency. Listeners will learn all the roles firefighters have, the tools they use, and how people get this exciting, fast-paced job.

What is new about how teenagers communicate through services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Do social media affect the quality of teens' lives? In this eye-opening book, youth culture and technology expert Danah Boyd uncovers some of the major myths regarding teens' use of social media. She explores tropes about identity, privacy, safety, danger, and bullying. Ultimately, Boyd argues that society fails young people when paternalism and protectionism hinder teenagers' ability to become informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens through their online interactions.

The United States is obsessed with virginity from the media to schools to government agencies. In The Purity Myth Jessica Valenti argues that the country’s intense focus on chastity is damaging to young women. Through in-depth cultural and social analysis, Valenti reveals that powerful messaging on both extremes ranging from abstinence curriculum to Girls Gone Wild infomercials place a young woman’s worth entirely on her sexuality. Morals are therefore linked purely to sexual behavior, rather than values like honesty, kindness, and altruism.

This is the audio summary of Switch, a book that explores how transforming your mindset can produce effective change.

Truth: A User's Guide explores how we can guard against the noise of competing truths, in business, in our personal relationships, and within ourselves, but also how we can use them to our advantage. Written with authority and humour, this is an accessible and illuminating narrative that will find a wide audience among listeners in search of understanding why the meaning of "truth" seems to have gone completely haywire.

This is an audio summary of Grain Brain, a book that offers an in-depth look at how we can take control of our "smart genes" through specific dietary choices and lifestyle habits, demonstrating how to remedy our most feared maladies without drugs.

In our modern-day world, it can often prove difficult to step back and recenter ourselves. This Beta Wave composition is packed full of many binaural beats designed with pleasant sound waves to enable our mind to release stress and find a moment of true relaxation and focus. For a solid 4.5 HOURS, the sound waves produce a gentle, pleasant, and very calming sensation that listeners will want to repeat over and over while sleeping, studying, and working.

This audiobook describes some of the things that nurses do to help people stay healthy.

This audiobook describes some of the things that doctors do to help people stay healthy.

This book looks at the rich diversity of shopping experiences around the world. It introduces children to similarities found when shopping in different cultures, and honors differences.

How do the emergency services in different countries of the world rescue people? How do they travel and what equipment do they use? This book looks at the work of ambulance services around the world, including how they take sick and injured people to hospitals and how they care for patients during transport.

Visit the doctor's office!

Visit a fire station, including descriptions of the people and things found there.

Beauty in a Box uses an interdisciplinary framework, engaging with African American history, critical race and cultural theory, consumer culture theory, media studies, diasporic art history, Black feminism, visual culture, film studies and political economy to explore the history of Black beauty culture in both Canada and the United States.

Are the ways we look at menopause all wrong? Historian Susan Mattern says yes, and The Slow Moon Climbs reveals just how wrong we have been. Taking listeners from the rainforests of Paraguay to the streets of Tokyo, Mattern draws on historical, scientific, and cultural research to reveal how our perceptions of menopause developed from prehistory to today. For most of human history, people had no word for menopause and did not view it as a medical condition. Rather, in traditional foraging and agrarian societies, it was a transition to another important life stage.

Many women still suffer a long-ingrained dissociation with their own vaginas and a misunderstanding of what goes on "down there". With expertise and a dose of humor, leading ob-gyn, educator, and women's health advocate Dr. Sherry Ross addresses every urgent, confounding, culturally taboo or embarrassing question women have about vaginas, with the goal of healthier, happier lives for all.

Case Studies in Behavioral Forensic Analysis is a companion (technical, practitioner) audiobook to Dr. Ruben’s earlier book Behavioral Forensics: Using Applied Behavior Analysis in Psychological Court Evaluations (2020). It liberally expands the campaign to transform traditional forensic psychological evaluations into behaviorally (evidence-based) psychological evaluations. Basic (experimental) and applied research serve the foundation in elucidating the opaque splatter of criminal actions into transparently coherent and molecular units of behaviors.

Women can be murderers and child abusers. They can commit acts of extreme and sadistic brutality. And those who do, are outcasts from society and from womanhood itself. They are seen as monsters and angels of death: and must be kept at a safe distance. Anna Motz is a renowned clinical and forensic psychologist in London and New York. Writing with candor, compassion, and a clear-eyed perspective, she explores in depth the shockingly underexamined psychological underpinnings of female violence.