An Eye For An I

As a girl coming of age during the era of civil rights, Patricia Bath made it her mission to become a doctor. When obstacles like racism, poverty, and sexism threatened this goal, she persevered--brightening the world with a game-changing treatment for blindness. Illustrations.x 10.

"This is the second edition of an encyclopedic reference work of consumer health about the adult human eye. It covers common eye complaints such as dry eye, ocular migraine, device-related eyestrain, and conjunctivitis, along with newer forms of laser eye therapy and lens implants. The second edition features a new chapter on cosmetics and the eye, along with updated content about diagnostic testing, new forms of eyeglass materials, colored contacts, and therapies for medical conditions for all areas of the eye"--

This book is a historical and philosophical meditation on paying back and buying back, that is, it is about retaliation and redemption. It takes the law of the talion - eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth - seriously. In its biblical formulation that law states the value of my eye in terms of your eye, the value of your teeth in terms of my teeth. Eyes and teeth become units of valuation. But the talion doesn't stop there. It seems to demand that eyes, teeth, and lives are also to provide the means of payment. Bodies and body parts, it seems, have a just claim to being not just money, but the first and precisest of money substances. In its highly original way, the book offers a theory of justice, not an airy theory though. It is about getting even in a toughminded, unsentimental, but respectful way. And finds that much of what we take to be justice, honor, and respect for persons requires, at its core, measuring and measuring up.

An Eye for an Eye, Book One in The Tales of Zebadiah Creed: Lower Missouri River, late summer 1835. Two brothers, fur trappers Zebadiah and Jonathan Creed, are bushwhacked. Jonathan is murdered and Zebadiah left dead. Zeb is found by a Quaker doctor and his daughter, who nurse him back to health and insist he stay with them. But the appeal of a peaceful life cannot quell Zeb’s burning desire for revenge and he sets out to find the two men who killed his brother. In recounting his search, Zebadiah Creed spins an exciting tale that leads readers by steamboat down the Great Mississippi to St. Louis and on to New Orleans, where Zeb finds revenge is never as simple as killing a man, and retribution and redemption are not the same.

We cannot escape from philosophy because we philosophise when we reflect critically on how we are living and the study of living, suitably elaborated, is philosophy. Philosophies embody ideas of considerable force and fascination which can change lives. To live a philosophy we need to penetrate the illusions of appearance and the delusions of common sense by which life misleads us. Because philosophy is thinking about thinking it is a subversive and liberating activity. It is subversive because philosophers are never satisfied with final answers. It is liberating because philosophers confront us with our prejudices. Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Epictetus, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus and others discussed here aim not merely to communicate information but challenge readers with striking ideas and to arouse curiosity, not to satisfy it.