What is like to live without touch or movement/position sense (proprioception)? The only way to understand the importance of these senses, so familiar we cannot imagine their absence, is to ask someone in that position. Ian Waterman lost them below the neck over forty years ago, though pain and temperature perception and his peripheral movement nerves were unaffected. Without proprioceptive feedback and touch the movement brain was disabled. Completely unable to move, he felt disembodied and frightened. Then, slowly, he taught himself to dress, eat and walk by thinking about each movement and with visual supervision. In Losing Touch, the narrative moves between biography and scientific research, theatre, documentary and zero gravity. He has been married three times, and built up successful careers in disability access audit, using his impairment to his advantage, and in rare turkey breeding and journalism. The neuroscience has led to data on movement without feedback, the pleasantness of touch, gesture, pain and body orientation in space. The account shows how the science was actually done but also reveals Ian's journey from passive subject to informed critic of science and scientists and that the science has given him both more understanding but also greater confidence personally. His unique response to such a rare condition has also led to a BBC documentary, theatrical portrayals and a weightless flight with NASA. As a young man he sought triumph over his impairment; now, nearly 65, he has more mature reflections on living with such an extraordinary loss, the limits it has imposed and the opportunities it has enabled. He gives his views on scientists and on others he has met including Oliver Sacks and Peter Brook. In an Afterword those from science, the arts and philosophy give an appreciation of his contribution. The book is the result of nearly 30 years close collaboration between author and subject.

Arjun brought his family to North West London after Indian independence, but hopes of a better life rapidly dissipate. His wife Sunila spends all day longing for an Aga and a nice English tea service, his son hates anything Indian, and his daughter, well, that’s a whole other problem. Reeling from the death of his younger brother, Arjun vainly attempts to enforce the values he grew up with, while his family eagerly embrace the new. But when his right leg suddenly fails him, Arjun’s growing sense of imbalance is more than external. Offering an intimate and touching portrait of an immigrant family precariously balanced on the cusp of East and West, Hunter’s strikingly sympathetic characters remind us of our own shortfalls, successes, hypocrisies - and humanity.

A behavioral scientist explores love, belongingness, and fulfillment, focusing on how modern technology can both help and hinder our need to connect. A Next Big Idea Club nominee. Millions of people around the world are not getting the physical, emotional, and intellectual intimacy they crave. Through the wonders of modern technology, we are connecting with more people more often than ever before, but are these connections what we long for? Pandemic isolation has made us even more alone. In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide. Drouin explains that intimacy is not just sex—although of course sex is an important part of intimacy. But how important? Drouin reports on surveys that millennials (perhaps distracted by constant Tinder-swiping) have less sex than previous generations. She discusses pandemic puppies, professional cuddlers, the importance of touch, “desire discrepancy” in marriage, and the value of friendships. Online dating, she suggests, might give users too many options; and the internet facilitates “infidelity-related behaviors.” Some technological advances will help us develop and maintain intimate relationships—our phones, for example, can be bridges to emotional support. Some, on the other hand, might leave us out of touch. Drouin explores both of these possibilities.

The rise of modern science stirred up a mix of unease and exhilaration that profoundly influenced early modern English literature. During the scientific revolution, the dominant Aristotelian picture of nature, which cohered closely with common sense and ordinary perceptual experience, was completely overthrown. Although we now take for granted the ideas that the earth revolves around the sun and that seemingly solid matter is composed of tiny particles, these concepts seemed equally counterintuitive, anxiety provoking, and at odds with our ancestors’ embodied experience of the world. In Losing Touch with Nature, Mary Thomas Crane examines the complex way that the new science’s threat to intuitive Aristotelian notions of the natural world was treated and reflected in the work of Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and other early modern writers. Crane breaks new ground by arguing that sixteenth-century ideas about the universe were actually much more sophisticated, rational, and observation-based than many literary critics have assumed. The earliest stages of the scientific revolution in England were most powerfully experienced as a divergence of intuitive science from official science, causing a schism between embodied human experience of the world and learned explanations of how the world works. This fascinating book traces the growing awareness of that epistemological gap through textbooks and natural philosophy treatises to canonical poetry and plays, presciently registering and exploring the magnitude of the human loss that accompanied the beginnings of modern science.

The breakdown of the family has moved in recent years to the forefront of national consciousness. All manner of social ills, from poor academic performance to teenage drug use and gang crime, have been attributed to high divorce rates and the collapse of the traditional two-parent family. Targets of particularly harsh criticism are parents who lose all contact with their children after a divorce. So-called "deadbeat dads" are denounced in political speeches and ridiculed on billboard advertisements; mothers who lose touch with their children are stigmatized as emotionally unstable or lacking maternal instincts. Everyone seems to understand the importance of children being raised by two-parent families and the damage that can occur when one parent loses contact completely. What is significantly less clear is why this loss of contact occurs and what can be done to prevent it. In Out of Touch, Geoffrey Greif explores these issues with clarity, compassion, insight, and an evenhandedness rarely encountered in an arena far more susceptible to acrimonious debate than sympathetic understanding. Setting out to find the reality beneath the catchall categorization of out-of-touch parents as deadbeats, substance abusers, child mistreaters, or criminals, Greif focuses on those parents who tried and, for a vast array of reasons, failed to maintain contact with their children. It is their voices, in a discussion dominated up till now by the custodial parent, that we most need to hear, Greif argues, if we are to uncover ways to avoid such failures in the future. Rather than offering dry statistics and abstract generalizations, Greif lets us hear these voices directly in 26 in-depth interviews with estranged parents and with children caught in the crossfire of painful divorces. Extending over a period of two to ten years, these interviews, and Greif's perceptive analyses of them, reveal the whole spectrum of logistical, emotional, and legal difficulties that keep parents and children apart. From the ordinary problems of visitation rights and child support to the more complex and troubling issues--bitter court battles, accusations of sexual abuse, domestic violence, children rejecting a parent, child kidnapping, and many others--Out of Touch vividly and often heartbreakingly presents all the ways that fathers and mothers, even with the best intentions, can lose contact with their children. But the book does more than tell the stories of failed relationships. Its concluding chapter offers a series of specific and extremely helpful suggestions for families--parents, children, grandparents--who find themselves in danger of complete estrangement. Greif outlines how families can employ support systems, communication skills, mediation, and many other strategies to overcome the most difficult obstacles that occur after a divorce. It is here that the lessons gleaned from the broken relationships of the past become invaluable advice for the future. Informed by fresh perspectives, moving personal accounts, and a clear-sighted approach to a tangled issue, Out of Touch is a timely and deeply important book about both the forces that drive parents and children apart and the understanding that can keep them together.

Claudia Jones is missing. Her classmates are thinking the worst . . . or at least the weirdest. It couldn't be an alien abduction, right? None of Claudia's classmates at Blithedale High know why she vanished—and they're dealing with their own issues. Emily's trying to handle a life-changing surprise. Paula's hoping to step out of Emily's shadow. Nigel just wants to meet a girl who will laugh at his jokes. And Brett hardly lets himself get close to anybody. In Losing the Girl, the first book in the Life on Earth trilogy, Eisner-nominated cartoonist MariNaomi looks at life through the eyes of four suburban teenagers: early romance, fraying friendships, and the traces of a mysterious—maybe otherworldly—disappearance. Different chapters focus on different characters, each with a unique visual approach.

Richard Kearney offers a timely call for the cultivation of the basic human need to touch and be touched. Making the case for the complementarity of touch and technology, this book is a passionate plea to recover a tangible sense of community and the joys of life with others.