Iroquois Medical Botany or World of Light

Iroquois Medical Botany

Author: James W Herrick

This is the first book to provide a guide to understanding the use of herbal medicines in traditional Iroquois culture. The world view of the Iroquois League or Confederacy - the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations - is based on a strong cosmological belief system. This is evident, especially in their medical practices, which connect man to nature and the powerful forces in the supernatural realm. This book relates Iroquois cosmology to cultural themes by showing the inherent spiritual power of plants and how the Iroquois traditionally have used and continue to use plants as remedies.

Booknews

A guide to the use of herbal medicines in traditional Iroquois culture and their place in Iroquois cosmology. Examines Iroquois folk conceptions of health and medicine, based on interviews with Iroquois elders. Describes medical practitioners such as herbalists and clairvoyants, Indian and white doctors, communal medicine, and counterwitchcraft. The bulk of the book is given to native names, uses, and preparations of medicinal plants from several different tribes. Black-and-white drawings accompany most entries. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Preface
	Introduction	1
1	Plants in the Cosmos of the Iroquois	5
2	Folk Conceptions of Health and Medicine	25
3	Conceptions of Illness in Traditional Iroquois Culture	33
4	Medical Treatments in Traditional Iroquois Culture	65
5	Powerful Medicinal Plants in Traditional Iroquois Culture	89
6	Native Names, Uses, and Preparations of Plants	95
	References Cited	251
	Plant Picture Credits	255
	Index	257

Interesting textbook: O Manual de Meios de comunicação:um Guia Completo de Publicidade de Seleção de Meios de comunicação, Planejamento, Pesquisa, e Compra

World of Light

Author: Floyd Skloot

From the winner of the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction In his award-winning memoir In the Shadow of Memory, Floyd Skloot told the hard story of coming to terms with a brain-ravaging virus. A World of Light, written with the same insight, passion, and humor that distinguished the earlier volume, moves Skloot’s story from the reassembly of a self after neurological calamity to the reconstruction of a shattered life. More than fifteen years after a viral attack compromised his memory and cognitive powers, Skloot now must do the vital work of recreating a cohesive life for himself even as he confronts the late stages of his mother’s advancing dementia. With tenderness and candor, he finds surprising connection with her where it had long been missing, transforming the end of her life into a time of unexpected renewal. At the same time, Skloot and his wife are building a rich new life at the center of a small isolated forest on a hillside in rural Oregon, where a dwindling water supply and the bitter assaults of the weather bring an elemental perspective to his attempts to make himself once more at home in the world. By turns poignant, funny, and frightening, A World of Light balances the urgency to capture fragmented, fleeting memories with the necessity of living fully in the present.

Kirkus Reviews

Skloot sketches the similarities between his own mental deterioration due to a brain-ravaging virus and his nonagenarian mother's dementia. This sequel to In the Shadow of Memory (2003) opens shortly after Skloot moves his mother from her home in New York to a long-term care facility near his Oregon residence. For most of her life, Lillian Skloot was a bitter, harsh woman; her son now finds himself navigating an emotionally charged role reversal as he tries to accept the sweet, childlike dependent that she has become. Perhaps the most distinguished aspect of this book, sections of which were previously published in The Best American Science Writing 2003, The Best American Essays 2004 and The Antioch Review, is Skloot's economy in rendering his miserable childhood. Instead of lengthy, purple litanies of youthful horrors, he offers spare sentences that evoke a world. "For years I thought mothers normally bit deep gouges into their own wrists when children spilled a glass of milk," he writes. "I imagined all boys and girls listened while their mothers dialed the phone, asked to talk to the director of the county hospital's 'insane unit,' and asked if there was a room available for a little boy who had disobeyed his mother." The book does, at times, feel disjointed. (At one point, for example, Skloot interrupts an eloquent description of his mother for a seemingly irrelevant recollection of an adolescent romance. Perhaps this disjointedness pushes the reader even further into the author's territory, a place where our minds are not reliable, where we feel dislocated, where we have to come to terms with our own frailty and the frailty of those we love. Deserves a wide audience.