In 2005, surgeons in France removed part of the face from a cadaver and grafted it onto the head of a 38-year-old woman grossly disfigured by a dog attack. Three years later, in December, 2008, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic announced they had performed the first U.S. face transplant. Although modern culture is accustomed to pushing medicine and the human body beyond all limits, the world's first partial face transplant and the seven that have followed have caused a stir that still reverberates globally. This book begins with the story of Isabelle Dinoire, the recipient of the first face transplant, and chronicles her surgery and battles with tissue rejection. Its scope widens with a look at how surgical teams, including three U.S. transplant teams, are in a global race to perform the first full face transplant, and at how medical history has led up to this point—with prior successful transplants ranging from body parts as simple as cornea to those as neurologically complicated as the heart, a hand, and a penis. The most novel among these surgeries—the face transplant—conjures up particular and expansive psychological issues. Authors Bluhm and Clendenin show how transplant recipients struggle with functional issues including a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs, a danger highlighted by the recent death of the second face transplant patient, in China. But just as challenging in the case of face transplant is the psychological effect on—and potential threat to—identity. Who are you, if suddenly your face—or a significant portion of it—is not what you were born with? What is it like to look in the mirror, and see a face that is not the one you have always had? Dinoire lamented, "It will never be me." That statement is an absolute simplification of the identity issues a face transplant can create, explain the authors. Bluhm and Clendenin show how, across history and media, humankind—via medicine, literature, film, and other media—has dreamed of a day when face transplants would be possible. With so many disfigurements occurring among the military in Iraq, and experimental face transplants too expensive for implementation in the private sector, it is likely that the U.S. military will take the reins and further face transplant techniques as quickly as possible to serve injured personnel.

Who are we? Where is the boundary between us and everything else? Are we all multiple personalities? And how can we control who we become? From distinguished psychologist Robert Levine comes this provocative and entertaining scientific exploration of the most personal and important of all landscapes: the physical and psychological entity we call our self. Using a combination of case studies and cutting-edge research in psychology, biology, neuroscience, virtual reality and many other fields, Levine challenges cherished beliefs about the unity and stability of the self - but also suggests that we are more capable of change than we know. Transformation, Levine shows, is the human condition at virtually every level. Physically, our cells are unrecognizable from one moment to the next. Cognitively, our self-perceptions are equally changeable: A single glitch can make us lose track of a body part or our entire body, or to confuse our very self with that of another person. Psychologically, we switch back and forth like quicksilver between incongruent, sometimes adversarial sub-selves. Socially, we appear to be little more than an ever-changing troupe of actors. And, culturally, the boundaries of the self vary wildly around the world - from the confines of one's body to an entire village. The self, in short, is a fiction: vague, arbitrary, and utterly intangible. But it is also interminably fluid. And this unleashes a world of potential. Engaging, informative, and ultimately liberating, Stranger in the Mirror will change forever how you think about your self - and what you might become.

Wiggling a pencil so that it looks like it is made of rubber, "stealing" your niece's nose, and listening for the sounds of the ocean in a conch shell– these are examples of folk illusions, youthful play forms that trade on perceptual oddities. In this groundbreaking study, K. Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice argue that these easily overlooked instances of children's folklore offer an important avenue for studying perception and cognition in the contexts of social and embodied development. Folk illusions are traditionalized verbal and/or physical actions that are performed with the intention of creating a phantasm for one or more participants. Using a cross-disciplinary approach that combines the ethnographic methods of folklore with the empirical data of neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, Barker and Rice catalogue over eighty discrete folk illusions while exploring the complexities of embodied perception. Taken together as a genre of folklore, folk illusions show that people, starting from a young age, possess an awareness of the illusory tendencies of perceptual processes as well as an awareness that the distinctions between illusion and reality are always communally formed.

Mr. Anthony Hope is finding out his enviable position. Do what he will, he has the power to please most people. Whatever be his moods, and whatever the quality of his performance, he is never awkward, and elegance of form in any literary matter popularly interesting is so uncommon that gratitude and admiration are widespread and intense in proportion. Now that he is finding this out, it is not surprising that he should take advantage of it, and give pleasure to his numerous admirers as frequently and with as little trouble to himself as possible. It is impertinent to pry into the state of Mr. Hope's soul to see if it is growing demoralised by easy triumphs, but it is quite justifiable to say that a little more effort than is to be found in this book is wanted to keep to the estimate which some sincere but discreet admirers have formed of his powers. The stories here are entertaining, and the youth of fourteen who should disapprove of them would do so from mere dulness. But there are features in it that would lead one to believe they were not written for lads in their early teens. Yet it is not exactly a book for men and women, to whom the tales, excellent in imagining as many of them are, must be spoilt by the artificiality of the mechanism, and the conventionality of all the motives, feelings, and expressions, of the human beings concerned. Mr. Hope is a novelist of power, and he gives us an unimpeachable gift-book of a quality equalled by a dozen boys' story writers any Christmas. His Antonio he calls an outlaw ; but he is the outlaw of a maiden-aunt's or a schoolmaster's imagination—compounded of demi-god and family pastor. True, he appears to us through the narrative of a holy father, but Mr. Hope chose that medium, and if it was unsuitable for the rough record of the wild men who took to the hills, he is responsible.