He is always their for her. Once Sera finds out that Liam is a Vampire she too is very supported of him. The love they show each other just shines throughout the story. Their are some wonderful characters in the book like Kathleen and Danielle Sera's two best friends. Liam has four best friends in the story Doug, Jack, Mike and David.
These guys were childhood friends and finding out how they all became vampires was diffidently a new twist for paranormal stories. We have villains too Beth who was the maker of Liam and his friends, Jacob, and Michelle who was suppose to be a friend to Sera. The story is very balanced from beginning to end beautifully written with depth of characters, believable conversations, even the environment; you could picture yourself their in the story with these people.
It's fast paced, romantic,very sensual, and suspenseful. Davies needs a editor, but let me tell you unless you are and English Major it won't bother you. I have read books published my major publishing house that had more editing problems. Plus this book is free!! I really loved this story and you will too!!
Give it a try whiles it is free. I would have paid to read this book. I have already bought and started reading bk2 "Destined". I am looking forward to more books in this series by this author. Very Well Done Brenda K. Keep up the good writing. Jan 19, Meags rated it it was ok Shelves: What I did do was recently purchase the audio edition for a reduced price , which turned out to be wildly disappointing. In my opinion, the story itself suffered from poor character development.
I felt nothing for the heroine, Sera, who I assume was meant to elicit sympathy and compassion from the reader, what with her view spoiler [traumatic pa 2 Stars I failed to fully connect with this story. I felt nothing for the heroine, Sera, who I assume was meant to elicit sympathy and compassion from the reader, what with her view spoiler [traumatic past and hide spoiler ] shy and insecure nature.
In actuality, she came across as whiny and weak-minded, and often induced some pretty intense eye-rolls from me. She allowed too many people to walk over her and treat her like shit — people who were apparently her closest friends!? This alone was ridiculous. What the fuck was up with this bitch? At the same time, Michelle was simply laughable. She was like a caricature of the most extreme version of mean girls in cinema. I mean, do these kinds of people truly exist? She was even more absurd hide spoiler ].
Three to compare
The characters, especially the females, were inane and overly dramatic — this is where I wonder how much the audio edition impacted my experience. The audio — narrated by Tavia Gilbert — just did not work for me. The voices were grating. I couldn't work out why the narrator made this particular choice. Just because the characters were a bunch of young college students, doesn't mean they all have to sound like a bunch of whiny morons.
Simply put - I didn't like this narration.
- Clinician of compassion: Oliver Sacks opened a window to the extraordinary.
- Awakenings Festival 2018.
- Ave Maria!
- Login to my awake?
At its core, this was a new adult love story, which just happened to have a side order of paranormal elements. What I did like about the story: I feel like my low rating was severely impacted by the audio edition I listened to. After the shadow that the Twilight series cast on vampire stories, I wasn't expecting this to be a great book. Most of the vampire-based novels and novellas coming out these days, have obvious influences from Stephanie Meyers' books. The synopsis sounded interesting, so I figured I'd give it a try.
Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised. While I could definitely see some similarities between this book and the entire Twilight series, it was only in certain areas, and only when I consciously looked fo After the shadow that the Twilight series cast on vampire stories, I wasn't expecting this to be a great book. While I could definitely see some similarities between this book and the entire Twilight series, it was only in certain areas, and only when I consciously looked for it. It's still original enough to be interesting and exciting, and no one sparkled The depth of the characters was surprising and enjoyable- not something I had been expecting.
Sera's struggles and past pain are things I think a lot of young women can relate to, and her character draws you in from the first page. Her personal growth, and the relationship she develops with Liam, are both simply wonderful. Liam is a perfect example of a vampire-version dream hunk in most young women's day-dreams.
Oliver Sacks, eminent neurologist and Awakenings author, dies aged 82
He's confident and strong, but also has a softer side, much like a sparkly guy with great hair we're all familiar with The side characters are awesome as well, and all do a fantastic job of shaping the story and helping the events go from interesting to exciting. You couldn't ask for better friends than the ones Sera and Liam have, and the relationships we see with them give the story added depth. The surprising twist in the last quarter of the book was simply fantastic, and added a sense of danger and suspense to the story.
While I personally didn't care for the ending itself, I know most people would, and it was a decent ending for the story. It's sure to satisfy most readers. The writing was very good, flowed easily and quickly. The author does a fantastic job of capturing all the emotions of the story, without being too dramatic or getting lost in dialogue. I had much higher hopes for this book.
I made it about twenty percent of the way through it only to decide I was wasting my time. When there are so many grammatical errors that I am too distracted to get into the story, there's a problem. Notice my spelling of "to" " I stopped counting the number of times the author made an error with this simple word "I have to finish. Sometimes she spelled it correctly, sometimes she didn't.
Sometimes she used it both correctly and incorrectly in the SAME sentence- as evidenced above. It just became TOO distracting. I know it doesn't sound like it, but I can overlook a lot. I've read books previously that had some errors throughout but I could overlook them if the story pulled me in. Some of those books I really enjoyed and gave a great review because the story was so good. But it wasn't just the grammar in this book that did me in- the characters grated on my nerves as well. The girl Sera is supposed to come across as someone who illicits sympathy from the reader.
She only seemed to me to be a whiny victim with low self esteem. I understand she's been through a traumatic experience, but the way she is written makes me wonder why anyone would like her at all- especially the super hot lead guy in the story. All the two of them have done so far is make out and wallow in their strong feelings for each other. I'm puzzled as to why they are even together. And after knowing him for less than a day, Sera is divulging her big, shameful secret to Liam. She doesn't even know him and she's telling him something she hasn't even told her best friend of three years.
I don't understand it. What had Liam done to win her trust? And I'm sorry, but I don't find it realistic for a girl in her early twenties to speak like this: It just doesn't sound natural. A word of advice- either get an editor or get a proofreader that will actually tell you the truth. You could have a wonderful, original, interesting book but you'll lose a lot of your audience if they can't see past all the errors and inconsistencies.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. Nov 02, Jacqueline's Reads rated it really liked it Shelves: This is the kind of book where you know the angst will be low, the steam will be high and the overly dramatic gestures are what you need to bring a smile on your face. I liked the insta-lust, I liked the fast pace movement of the book and the romance between Sera and Liam was typical, but in a good way.
Sera is the damaged college girl that no one can get near. Liam is the hot boy on campus that everyone wants to be and be with. Makes for a good couple right? I think my drama meter was a bit on overload, but overall the read was good. I don't think I have ever given a 1 star rating but I could not muster up a 2 here, I did try please believe me.
The editing on this book was skipped completely and the errors were just too much, words were completely missing in some sentences. I don't know how many times you can say he hissed, he grated whatever that means , his hands tightened around her, her bottom lip trembled, he bellowed, his eyes snapped towards this person or that person, his jaw clenched, her jaw clenched, her eyes wide I don't think I have ever given a 1 star rating but I could not muster up a 2 here, I did try please believe me.
I don't know how many times you can say he hissed, he grated whatever that means , his hands tightened around her, her bottom lip trembled, he bellowed, his eyes snapped towards this person or that person, his jaw clenched, her jaw clenched, her eyes widened, his eyes widened and so on - these phrases were used way too much, sometimes 2 or 3 times in one paragraph. The Jacob character went from having brown eyes to blue on the same page or maybe the very next page I am not sure; character development was non-existent besides a wimpy trembling fool of a girl. A woman's nipples are now reduced to being called nubs?
I truly believe the story may have been a good one if executed properly and edited, perhaps even a little bit of sex research - I found a lot of awkwardness with "hands". Oct 04, Maya rated it liked it Shelves: Now, I should have known something was not right when I saw that it was for free, but I somehow convinced myself to give this story a chance. I should've listened to my gut feeling.
But first let me tell you the tings that I did like about this book. And I'm glad there was no break-up between them. That would've sucked, since this is a PNR story, where everything is allowed in love and war. If you like to read about a hot, possessive, totally OTT hero that would kill to protect his love, then Liam is the one for you. I wished there were more books with heroes like him. Beside him, I also liked his friends.
They were cool and just what you'd expect from a frat boy. So that means my expectations were high for this author and her writing style. Sadly they were too high And let me tell you why As good as the plot sounded, the execution of it was just not that great. It all happened either too fast the beginning and the ending or too slow the whole vampire thing and how to solve the BIG problem.
Also, at times the characters were really immature, especially with the bitter exes, and I often wondered, if maybe it was just me being too old to read a book like this one. But whatever the reason, one thing is for sure, I did not like the characters as much as I wanted them to.
Another thing that bothered me was that the whole pace of the story was just off. I felt like sometimes we skipped from one scene to another, so the natural flow of the story felt too disconnected to me. I wished the author had taken her time to include more details about what was happening in general. The saving grace was David and his knowledge of vampires.
I'm sure I would be completely lost without him explaining things. He was like Yoda from Star wars. Overall, would I re-read this book? Would I recommend it? If you have time on your hands and don't know what to read next, then this one might be for you. It's just the right amount of fluffy, stupid and interesting. I know, a killer combination, lol. But if nothing else, it will make your evening slightly better. Sep 19, Lynsey A rated it really liked it Shelves: This paranormal vampire book had a different feel to it from the other vampire books I've read.
I really didn't know what to expect from this book, since the hero and heroine had an instant connection and got together pretty quickly, but was pleasantly surprised with how the story went.. It slowed down a little in the middle but then picked back up again. There are some intense love scenes in the book.
The entire book did have a New Adult feel to it as well with some paranormal on th This paranormal vampire book had a different feel to it from the other vampire books I've read. The entire book did have a New Adult feel to it as well with some paranormal on the side. You actually wouldn't know it is a book about vampires if you hadn't seen the series name. It isn't straightforward when we first meet the hero. We find out, basically when the heroine does.
I'm definitely keen to read more of this series. What a pleasant surprise this was. I loved Sera and Liam. They were great together. This was a little slow for me for maybe the first chapter. But then I was quickly swept away with this story. I thought this was YA but I was seriously mistaken. Since it take place at collage I would say NA to Adult for sure. There was a lot of sex going on. Sera a great character. She was strong in what she believed in. Even when things were tough and it would have been easier to walk away and she had her moment What a pleasant surprise this was.
Even when things were tough and it would have been easier to walk away and she had her moment where she almost would. But then it was like a switch was flipped and she thought it through before actually doing it. I think her only flaws were not being able to say no to her best friend Kathleen and she cried a lot.
The crying for me wasn't annoying though. Sera has also been struggling for the past few years and struggles to get close to men because she was sexually assaulted when she was in high school. Liam is the first guy that she feels safe with. Of course there is an instant connection, which by the end of the book you learn more about. Liam was a womanizer big time. But you learn later about all that as well. In fact in the beginning he decided that Sera will be his next conquest for the night. Was he ever surprised. This was one of those instant lust and then love within three weeks kinda thing.
But I enjoyed this so much that I didn't care. Liam was protective to the extreme and even became possessive to becoming to most obsessive. Again there's a reason and if you hang in there you find out why. It was kind of funny because Liam is a vampire but for a while there I wasn't so sure, I kept wondering when he show what he was.
I mean come on they drank a lot and they smoke. They can be in the sunlight and even eat food. This was filled with angst, partying, sex, action, drama, obsession, mystery and undying love. I was bummed when I read that the next book is in the future. I was really hoping that one of Liam's friends would have a book.
I didn't expect much considering this was a free book and it was about vampires, which let's face it has been a genre beat into the ground ever since Twilight. It takes a lot to make any kind of stand out vampire novel in this day and age. Awakened was decently different though, however it's also one of those novels that I think could have been delved into more in depth than what it was. I would have loved to have read a bit more about that.
Overall , the story was surprisingly good. This was one freebie that I had no problem getting through. Also , you should all be grateful that I got through this review because a spider fell on me during it. It was also one of those jumpy hoppy spiders, so I guess maybe he jumped on me, not really fell. Upon internet research though I have discovered that he was just trying to play me the song of his people Go play your song somewhere else jumpy spider, I'm not interested.
If you are a fan of dry, repetitive sex, this book is for you. If you love to read a book that has a definitive story arc and engulfing plot line, don't even bother. I pushed myself through this book with hopes that it would get better I'm really sorry this is so negative, but I feel if you must incorporate sex into every single chapter to get a good story, j If you are a fan of dry, repetitive sex, this book is for you.
I'm really sorry this is so negative, but I feel if you must incorporate sex into every single chapter to get a good story, just stop. Reading this book, the author was very careless with word choice. A constant he,she,it going on. The occasional mention of a name spotted through the pages. She seemed to lack even the most elementary of rules when it comes to writing.
I have become much more optimistic than I was when I […] wrote Awakenings, for there has been a significant number of patients who, following the vicissitudes of their first years on L-DOPA, came to do — and still do — extremely well. Such patients have undergone an enduring awakening, and enjoy possibilities of life which had been impossible, unthinkable, before the coming of L-DOPA. The book inspired the play A Kind of Alaska by Harold Pinter , performed as part of a trilogy of Pinter's plays titled Other Places , and a documentary television episode, the pilot of the British television programme Discovery.
The edition of the book is dedicated to the memory of poet W. Auden , and bears an extract from Auden's poem The Art of Healing:. Prior to his death, Auden himself wrote: In the book won the Hawthornden Prize. Gratitude , such a personal book, might seem but a non-medical footnote to Dr.
But that makes sense if we see medicine as only about "cures" — and dying as something it needn't concern itself with. In these final essays Dr. O liver Sacks's legacy was to restore a vision of a humane medicine that drew its power not from technological breakthroughs alone, but through the healing power of the doctor-patient relationship. It had roots in a more old-fashioned view that came in part from his general-practitioner father, who had close relationships with his patients and did frequent house calls.
It was a form of care that required an almost unheard-of immersion in the lives of his patients by Dr. Sacks, which allowed him to draw portraits of human beings of an incomparable subtlety and sensitivity, while shedding new light on the mysteries of the brain. He also rejuvenated for us the rich tradition of the case history.
It may sound a strange claim, but the detailed case history — which in the 19th century produced some of the finest descriptions of patients ever written — had all but disappeared from the neurology journals when Dr. Sacks started writing, and, even today, it is rare. With the advent of modern lab and scanning techniques, these observational and communicative skills atrophied. The journals changed, too. Detailed accounts of individual patients increasingly disappeared, replaced by group studies of "subjects," described in more abstract, statistical terms, based on their scans and scores on tests.
Instead of reporting what was unique about a patient, studies reported what was average about a population. And if an individual patient was described, it was often in a several-sentence anecdote — not to be confused with a detailed case history. If anything, the anecdote was intentionally nondescript, suppressing personal details, because it focused not on the person with the disease, but the disease itself.
To some tastes, this made the anecdote seem more "scientific. O liver Sacks's breakthrough book was based on his work at a backward chronic-care hospital, Beth Abraham, in the Bronx. It was the kind of place conventionally ambitious physicians avoided. There he discovered about 80 patients who had suffered an illness called encephalitis lethargica, which left them, after a period of great nervous excitement, with "sleeping sickness," often frozen in fixed postures, like "living statues," mute and unable to move.
An earlier physician had described them as "extinct volcanoes. To understand these often mute patients, Dr. Sacks totally immersed himself in their lives, moved into the hospital on-call apartment, and took call every night for almost four years, after working his regular hour days. Over time, he began to sort out their individual characters, and noted that they had Parkinson's disease-like symptoms.
Former "statues" turned into s-era flappers, and danced together. Though many were pushing 70, they felt as if they were in their twenties, and spoke using phrases, affectations and accents of their youth. Their faces seemed to confirm that suspension of time: Less well known, but a crucial spur to his development as a thinker and clinician, was what happened after. Sacks reported that, within months, his patients experienced major side effects on L-dopa, and cautioned that maybe these people were sensitive "canaries in the coal mine," and that L-dopa might best be used with caution on more typical Parkinson's patients.
He was viciously attacked. Sacks was struck by how his colleagues, though they thought of themselves as scientists, were using almost religious language, describing L-dopa as a "miracle drug. He published his findings in , not in a medical journal, but in a book meant for anyone who was interested: As years passed, and the side effects Dr.
Sacks in New York circa Hat , as his friends came to call it, explains how discrete localized brain problems lead to very specific changes in mental experience. The "man" of the title, Dr. The most famous scene in the book begins when Dr. Sacks had just finished examining him, "started to look around for his hat. He reached out his hand and took hold of his wife's head, tried to lift it off, to put it on.
If Awakenings was a feverish, tidal book, overwhelming with its stories of living death, resurrection, and living death returned, Hat was a more classical one: The idea of the case history goes back to ancient Greece, and Hippocrates, who first wrote about diseases having a course, a way of unfolding in time. Doctors began to write "histories" of their patients' illnesses, essentially biographies of disease, but, Dr. Sacks argued that this convention was no longer sufficient, and wrote, "To restore the human subject at the centre — the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject — we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale.
This restoration of the person to the centre was especially, and obviously, necessary for neurology, psychology and psychiatry, Dr. T he strongest single influence on Dr. Sacks's idea of how to develop these whimsical-sounding "clinical tales" was the Russian scientist Alexandr Luria It was from Dr. Luria, as a very young man, was a major contributor to the development of psychoanalysis in his country, and corresponded about the subject with Sigmund Freud — who was originally a neurologist, and who, according to Dr.
Sacks, wrote "matchless case-histories. But this was not to last. In the late s, under Joseph Stalin, psychoanalysis was decreed "politically incorrect. Luria, fearing for his survival, publicly renounced his ideological "mistake," and abruptly resigned from the Russian Psychoanalytical Society. He went off to medical school, and reinvented himself, pioneering the field of neuropsychology and the study of the higher cortical functions of the brain. But in private letters to Dr. Sacks, in , Dr. Luria made clear that he still took psychoanalysis seriously, and in one he offered a psychoanalytic interpretation of one of Dr.
Though he had disavowed his commitment to analysis, Dr. Sacks first read one of these book-length cases, Dr. Luria's The Mind of a Mnemonist , in about a Russian with an almost perfect memory who made his living performing feats on stage, but who was also deeply tormented because he could not, like most people, automatically forget unimportant events , Dr. Sacks thought it must have been a novel, Dr. When he realized it was non-fiction, Dr. Sacks was so filled with admiration that he also became overwhelmed with fear, thinking, "[W]hat place is there for me in the world?
Luria has already seen, said, written, and thought anything I can ever say, or write, or think. Sacks credits that book with altering the course of his life. The next summer, he wrote the first nine case histories of Awakenings. Luria, to whom the book was dedicated, was delighted, and wrote to Dr. With "the advent of the new instrumentation," technology was getting between the physician and the patient.
This would seem an extreme statement; after all, why must new technological tools lead to a loss of clinical reality? Can we not have both? Can one not enhance the other? Luria, according to Dr. Modern scientific medicine has taken a fundamentally materialist approach, and it is "analytical," meaning that it divides wholes into parts. It often proceeds by reducing complex phenomena to their more elementary chemical and physical components: Our technology measures these elements. In psychology, this materialist theory aims to reduce all psychological phenomena to physiological laws of how the brain works.
Luria worried, "One outcome of this approach is the reduction of living reality with all its richness of detail to abstract schemas. Luria wanted to restore the whole patient to scientific papers, and leave aside the abstractions, and even, he confessed, the description of personality with statistics. Can we human beings be understood solely in terms of our elements, our molecules, atoms, our parts, our circuits, our reflexes, even our behaviours? This was not a dry debate about how to report science, but about a profound philosophical difference.
Luria was a young man, he presented his first book, The Nature of Human Conflicts , which aimed to be both objective but also to report on cases in detail, to the pre-eminent Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, inventor of behaviourism. A day later, when Dr. Luria met him, the old man's eyes were blazing, and he tore the book in half and threw it to the ground, roaring, "You call this science! Science proceeds from elementary parts and builds up; here you are describing behaviour as a whole!
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Group studies look at aspects of people: For instance, they select scores on tests, and compare them. One would think that a larger study would always trump a single case study. Case histories can make hundreds of observations about a few people, and thus may not be representative of the larger population; group studies on the other hand, make a few observations about many people.
The assumption underlying the typical group study of a disease is that each participant has the same disease, and that any variation between them — whether they exercise, for instance, or have other genetic risk factors or psychological issues — is relatively insignificant. This assumption of uniformity certainly doesn't hold when talking about the brain, which is so complex, and differs extensively from person to person. This tremendous variation between patients is probably one key contributor to a problem that has now been acknowledged as a major one in the life and medical sciences: O ne would have to have lived in a cave within a cave for the last 10 years not to have noticed that many key medical findings from group studies are being reversed, almost monthly — be it studies on the usefulness of mammograms and prostate tests, or the effectiveness of various medications.
Many of the finest randomized controlled trials RCTs , we are now learning, cannot be replicated. A study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in showed that 35 per cent of the conclusions of the finest RCTs, assessed by peer review and published in the most respected medical journals, cannot be replicated on reanalysis of their raw data. Thus, there is less safety in numbers in these fields than we might wish.
Awakenings (book) - Wikipedia
I take no pleasure in this, as one who writes on life sciences. As for the retort that case histories are not "scientific" because they are not "quantitative" — that confuses statistics, one tool of science, with science itself. Francis Crick, who, after co-discovering DNA, turned his attention to the problem of consciousness, eagerly pored over the Sacks case histories in draft form. He did so knowing, as neurologist and neuroscientist V. Our views of what constitutes rigour in science depend on the paradigm of the day. Statistical paradigms dispense with non-statistical technologies.
But changing from one form of technology to another has unintended consequences. True, we don't tend to think of the case-history report as a technology. But I would argue that it is, and that the technology that underlies the case history is not just writing, but language itself — an invented medium that allows us to put our thoughts and subjective experiences into words.
And, so far, it is the best medium we have for becoming aware of and conveying private experiences. Language, though ancient, is not less sophisticated for being old, but more, having been refined over millennia. T he language we use for the doctor-patient encounter affects the nature of that very relationship.
The word "patient" comes from the root for "one who suffers" and it goes best with another old-fashioned word: But these words — the language of medicine for centuries — are increasingly being swept away by impersonal technological terms, which manage to be bland and hideously undignified at the same time: The language of "user" and provider" masks the fundamental insight in the word "patient.