Items related to Billy's Halo
Synopsis
Science is just one way of looking at life. As a neuroscientist working at the forefront of medical research, it is Ruth McKernan's way. For a while, it was her father Billy's too; science was a language they shared. When Billy succumbed to a mystery illness and slipped from consciousness into coma, Ruth watched his life ebb away with a mixture of love and terror. She struggled for control by using her scientific knowledge to analyse and understand his medical condition. Billy had been a demanding father, the postman's son who became a self-made success - but it took his collapse for Ruth to realize just how intense her feelings were for him. Now, she tells the story of her father's last year as a collection of cutting-edge scientific themes - memory, consciousness, microbes, stem cells - like pearls strung together on the thread of her father's life. The result is an inspired blending of personal emotion, love and grief, with a crystal-clear scientific explanation of the way our brains and bodies work in sickness and in health.
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About the Author
Ruth McKernan is a Vice President of Drug Discovery for a multinational pharmaceutical company and a visiting professor at London's Institute of Psychiatry.She is an internationally recognized neuroscientist whose talent for making complex science interesting, entertaining and understandable earned her the Glaxo/ABSW Science Writers' Award for her articles in the Independent. Ruth lives with her husband and two children near Canterbury in Kent.
From Publishers Weekly
This unique hybrid of memoir and science writing offers a remarkably intimate portrait of a British neuroscientist confronted with the tangible experience of modern science. McKernan was working for a major pharmaceutical company when her father became ill with a mysterious infection, and she repeatedly draws on her scientific training as she describes her father's illness and eventual death, taking refuge in the knowledge of what biology and neuroscience can now explain while wrestling with the questions still left unanswered. As a memoirist, McKernan holds nothing back, sharing her experiences both as a devoted daughter and as a scientist; the result is hugely compelling, nimbly shifting back and forth from micro to macro (she juxtaposes, for instance, a biological description of cell necrosis with the emotional consequences of watching a loved one slip away day by day). A reader will turn the last page with a clear sense of what modern science can tell us about life, death and consciousness, but the knowledge almost seems incidental; what sticks most is the nuanced and wrenchingly real experience of loss that no amount of scientific knowledge can buffer. (June)
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- PublisherDoubleday
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 0385608551
- ISBN 13 9780385608558
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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Billy's Halo: Love, Science, and My Father's Death
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Billy's Halo: Love, Science and My Father's Death.
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Billy's Halo: Love, Science And My Father's Death (SCARCE BRITISH HARDBACK FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR)
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Doubleday, London, 2006
ISBN 10: 0385608551
ISBN 13: 9780385608558
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Hardback. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. First British Edition, First Printing. NrF/VG. First British edition, first printing in d/w not price clipped. SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR, without dedication on half-title page. Signing reads, 'With best wishes/Ruth McKernan'. Part memoir, part science the author tells of her father's life and death. She includes much cutting-edge bioscience: a guide to everything from memory and consciousness to stem cells, bacterial infection and drug design. With Index. D/w has a few short edge tears (longest 9mm); d/w has small losses to corners of the d/w; else a near fine copy, in a very good d/w, of a SCARCE British first edition, first printing SIGNED BY THE AUTHOR. D/w now protected in a detachable, non-adhesive, clear sheaf. Signed by Author. Seller Inventory # 17413
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Billy's Halo
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ISBN 10: 0385608551
ISBN 13: 9780385608558
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