Health Biographies

Bryony Gordon was not a runner. A loafer, a dawdler, a drinker, a smoker, yes. A runner, no. Yet somehow, as she began to recover from the emotional roller coaster of laying her life bare in her mental health memoir Mad Girl, she started to realise that getting outside, moving her body and talking to others for whom life was also an occasional challenge might actually help her.

From the beginning, Geneen Roth was told she was too sensitive, too emotional, too curious, too demanding, too intense, and too big. Yet gaining and losing weight for decades did not improve her self-worth or reduce other people's criticisms. Like most women who struggle with their weight, she believed that if she could resolve what seemed to be the source of her self-hatred - how and what she ate - she would be thin, happy, and free. That belief, she discovered, was false.

For fans of Anne Lamott, Abigail Thomas, and Ayelet Waldman, a postdivorce memoir, one woman's story of starting over at 60-in youth-obsessed, beauty-obsessed Hollywood. After the death of her best friend, the loss of her life's savings, and the collapse of her once-happy marriage, Meredith Maran - whom Anne Lamott calls "insightful, funny, and human" - leaves her San Francisco freelance writer's life for a 9-to-5 job in Los Angeles.

She's never taught a class in her life. But when the City of Chicago calls on blind writer Beth Finke to teach a memoir-writing class for older adults, she reluctantly agrees. What she learns about her students, their stories, and herself will move and inspire you. Written the way Beth hears life, you will come to know and love Minerva, Wanda, Hannelore, and the whole colorful cast of characters who build a community around Beth's classes. Generously sprinkled with excerpts in her students' own voices, Beth's book will convince you to get your own stories down on paper.

In the fall of 1994, Erich Baumeister (13), was playing in a wooded area of his family’s estate, when he stumbled across a partially buried human skeleton. He presented the disturbing finding to his mother, Julie, who inquired about the skull to her husband, Herb. He told her that the skeleton belonged to his late father, an anesthesiologist. Astonishingly, Julie believed him. In You Think You Know Me, best-selling author Ryan Green assumes the role of Herb Baumeister and attempts to fill in the blanks on one of Indiana’s most mysterious serial killers.

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.

Dr. Helen Morrison has profiled more than 80 serial killers around the world. What she has learned about them will shatter every assumption you've ever had about the most notorious killers known to man.

For more than two years, author and psychotherapist Gary Greenberg has embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) - the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) compendium of mental illnesses and what Greenberg calls "the book of woe". Since its debut in 1952, the book has been frequently revised, and with each revision, the "official" view on which psychological problems constitute mental illness has changed.

Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her first and only child, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, and level-headed, but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education. But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three....

I never was a badass. Or a slut, a junkie, or a stoner, like they told me I was. I was just a kid looking for something good, something that felt like love. I was a wannabe in a Levi's jean jacket. Anybody could see that. Except my mother. And the staff at Straight. I was 13 when I ran away from my abusive home. After a month in a shelter for kids - the best month of my childhood - my mother heard about Princess Di and First Lady Nancy Reagan's visit to this place that was working miracles with troubled teens. Straight Inc., it was called.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.

A true scientific pause-resister that traces a remarkable scientific breakthrough (the isolation of endorphins in the brain) as dedicated scientists race - not only with their fellow scientists - but against time and the profit hungry giant pharmaceutical companies. This audiobook chronicles the fascinating discovery of endorphins, the body's natural painkiller.

When you are told that you have leukemia, your world stops. Your brain can't function. You are asked to make decisions about treatment almost immediately, when you are not in your right mind. And yet you pull yourself together and start asking questions. Beside you is your doctor, whose job it is to solve the awful puzzle of bone marrow gone wrong. The two of you are in it together. In When Blood Breaks Down, Mikkael Sekeres, a leading cancer specialist, takes listeners on the journey that patient and doctor travel together.

Everything Is an Emergency is about all the self-destructive stories someone tells himself, over and over, until they start to seem true. In images surreal, witty, and confessional, Jason shows us that OCD can be funny, even when it feels like it’s ruining your life.

At the age of 27, Whitney Dafoe was forced to give up his life as a photographer who traveled the world. Bit by bit a mysterious illness stole away the pieces of his life: First, it took the strength of his legs, then his voice, and his ability to eat. The Puzzle Solver follows several years in which he desperately sought answers. Whitney's father, Ron Davis, PhD, a world-class geneticist at Stanford University whose legendary research helped crack the code of DNA, suddenly changed the course of his career in a race against time to cure his son's debilitating condition.

In gripping prose, one of the world's leading cardiac surgeons lays bare both the wonder and the horror of a life spent a heartbeat away from death. When Stephen Westaby witnessed a patient die on the table during open-heart surgery for the first time, he was struck by the quiet, determined way the surgeons walked away. As he soon understood, this detachment is a crucial survival strategy in a profession where death is only a heartbeat away. In Open Heart, Westaby reflects on over 11,000 surgeries, showing us why the procedures have never become routine and will never be.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey's best-known work, is an account of his early life and opium addiction, in prose that is by turns witty, conversational, and nightmarish.

As with the two prior volumes of True Crime Case Histories, I want to start with a quick word of warning. Most news articles and television true crime shows skim over the sticky details of truly gruesome crimes. In my books I don't gloss over the facts, regardless of how horrible they may be. I try to give my listeners a clear and accurate description on just how demented the killers really were. I do my best not to leave anything out. The stories included in these books are not for the squeamish.

Michaela DePrince was known as girl no. 27 at the orphanage where she was abandoned at a young age and tormented as a "devil child" for a skin condition that makes her skin appear spotted. But it was at the orphanage that Michaela would find a picture of a beautiful ballerina en pointe that would help change the course of her life. At the age of four, Michaela was adopted by an American family who encouraged her love of dancing and enrolled her in classes.

Lange Zeit fragt sich Angelina Boerger: Bin ich einfach chaotisch und kann nicht gut mit Stress umgehen oder steckt vielleicht mehr dahinter? Mit Ende 20 erhält sie schließlich die Diagnose "AD(H)S im Erwachsenenalter" und ist erleichtert: Endlich hat die Kirmes in ihrem Kopf einen richtigen Namen. Schätzungsweise 2,5 Millionen Erwachsene sind in Deutschland von der Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-/Hyperaktivitätsstörung, kurz AD(H)S, betroffen. Die Symptome bei Erwachsenen sehen in der Regel anders aus als bei Kindern, und auch das Bild des klassischen "Zappelphilipps" ist längst überholt.