Uprooting The Poison Tree

In Uprooting The Poison Tree, the author traces her journey from a young girl fascinated with nature and biology to a mature woman who has fulfilled her dreams professionally and personally. She showcases her perseverance in seeking a doctorate in pharmacology from a medical school at a time when a woman's role was seen as mother and homemaker not a professional. Her path leads to a successful career as a corporate toxicologist for a large chemical company. Throughout, she uses carefully chosen poisons as metaphors for some of her "toxic" experiences, including a mentally ill sister, a father who was both a mentor and abuser, and a judgmental mother. She finds emotional "antidotes" to overcome each obstacle, including observance of the Jewish faith and its spirituality.This book will inspire those interested in science, those who have had abusive or unrewarding relationships, women in male-dominated professions, those seeking spiritual connections and meaning in religious practices, and those trying to find a soulmate later in life.

A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In Place Matters scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape. Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography’s tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place making in such sites as Colonus, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu’Appelle, Donetsk airport, and the island of Lesbos. With contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, and others, the collection examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration, residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge. In his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: “Places, like feasts, are moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography.” Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, Place Matters presents critical topography as an approach to analyze, interpret, and reflect on place.