Health Biographies

In the 1960s Ram Dass was a Harvard professor who turned to Eastern religion to answer the questions troubling his generation. He shared his story in the landmark classic, Be Here Now, which instantly captured the spiritual longings of his contemporaries. In Still Here, Ram Dass once again brings understanding, common sense, and reassurance for those of us facing the final season of life.

Legendary magician Penn Jillette was approaching his 60th birthday. Topping 330 pounds and saddled with a systolic blood pressure reading over 200, he knew he was at a dangerous crossroads: If he wanted to see his small children grow up, he needed to change. And then came Crazy Ray. A former NASA scientist and an unconventional, passionate innovator, Ray Cronise saved Jillette's life with his wild "potato diet". Outspoken, frank, and bitingly clever, Presto is an incisive, rollicking listen.

Nine months of tying tourniquets and pushing new medications, of IVs, chest compressions, and defibrillator shocks - that was Kevin Grange's initiation into emergency medicine when, at age 36, he enrolled in the "Harvard of paramedic schools": UCLA's Daniel Freeman paramedic program, long considered one of the best and most intense paramedic training programs in the world.

In her groundbreaking debut essay collection, actress Lily Collins—Golden Globe-nominated star of Rules Don’t Apply, Mortal Instruments, and To the Bone—is opening a poignant, honest conversation about the things young women struggle with: body image, self-confidence, relationships, family, dating, and so much more. Lily shares her life and her own deepest secrets, underlining that every single one of us experiences pain and heartbreak. We all understand what it’s like to live in the light and in the dark. For Lily, it’s about making it through to the other side, where you love what you see in the mirror and where you embrace yourself just as you are. She's learned that all it takes is one person standing up and saying something for everyone else to realize they’re not alone. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Lily’s honest voice will inspire you to be who you are and say what you feel. It’s time to claim your voice! It’s time to live your life unfiltered.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects.

Ten-year-old Pinchas is separated from his parents and twin sister when they are deported from the Warsaw ghetto to the killing site of Majdanek. As Pinchas is sent on to a series of concentration camps, he shuts himself off to the terrors surrounding him and tries his best not to be noticed, to become almost invisible.

With compassionate stories of his patients and their conditions, Dr. Leschziner illustrates the neuroscience behind our sleeping minds, revealing the many biological and psychological factors necessary in getting the rest that will not only maintain our physical and mental health, but improve our cognitive abilities and overall happiness.

A. J. Jacobs tackles his most challenging experiment yet: a yearlong mission to radically improve every element of his body and mind - from his brain to his fingertips to his abs. First, he had to tackle a complicated web of diet and exercise advice, most which is nonsensical, unproven, and contradictory. Second, he had to consult a team of medical advisers. And finally, he had to subject himself, over the course of two years, to a grueling regimen of exercises and a range of diets and nutritional plans.

In The Wheel of Life, when Kübler-Ross was 71 years old and facing her own death, this world-renowned healer told the story of her extraordinary life. Having taught the world how to die well, she offered a lesson on how to live well. The Wheel of Life is an adventure of the heart - powerful, controversial, inspirational - a fitting legacy of a powerful life.

The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power.

Human history hinges on the battle to confront our most dangerous enemies—the half-dozen diseases responsible for killing almost all of mankind. The story of our medical triumphs reveals an inspiring tapestry of human achievement, but the journey was far from smooth. It is a tale replete with dramatic episodes as spellbinding as any blockbuster Hollywood movie. In The Masters of Medicine, Dr. Andrew Lam, an award-winning author and retinal surgeon, distills the long arc of medical progress down to the crucial moments that were responsible for the world's greatest medical miracles.

In this powerful, wide-ranging, and emotional story about the limits of medical knowledge, Abel discovers why she wasn't diagnosed with celiac as a child. She considers how environmental fears and Internet anecdotes lead people to avoid gluten. And she grapples with the question that confronts us all: how to live calmly, even joyfully, in the face of uncertainty.

James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil.

This is the story of Joseph Pilates, a gifted man who immigrated to the United States at forty-three with no assets or credentials. He not only invented an exercise regimen—which today is practiced by more than ten million people—but in the process, reinvented himself. John Howard Steel brings Joseph Pilates and his eponymous exercise regime to life from his unique perspective as a student, friend, and confidant. Joe’s influence profoundly changed Steel’s life; in turn, Steel was crucial for the survival of the Pilates Method and Joe’s legacy.

From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, 24-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual". With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at 14, alcohol poisoning at 16, blacked-out sexual experience at 19, and total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at 22.

An epic story told by a unique voice in Ameri­can medicine, One Doctor describes life-changing experiences in the career of a distinguished physi­cian. In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today.

A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind’s military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. Bodies were battered, gouged, hacked, and gassed. The First World War claimed millions of lives and left millions more wounded and disfigured. In the midst of this brutality, however, there were also those who strove to alleviate suffering. The Facemaker tells the extraordinary story of such an individual: the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies.

Sixteen-year-old Elly Gotz hides with his family in an underground bunker in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania, prepared to die rather than be found by the Nazis. After surviving nearly three years in the ghetto, where thousands from the Jewish community have been murdered, Elly and his family refuse to be the Nazis’ next victims. But there is no escape from the liquidation of the ghetto in the summer of 1944, and Elly and his family are taken to Kaufering, a brutal subcamp of the notorious Dachau concentration camp.

One of the most influential living psychologists looks at the history of his life and discipline, and paints a much brighter future for everyone. When Martin E. P. Seligman first encountered psychology in the 1960s, the field was devoted to eliminating misery: it was the science of how past trauma creates present symptoms. Today, thanks in large part to Seligman's Positive Psychology movement, it is ever more focused not on what cripples life, but on what makes life worth living - with profound consequences for our mental health.