Health Biographies

Part memoir, part scientific investigation, Racing the Clock is the book biologist and natural historian Bernd Heinrich has been waiting his entire life to write. A dedicated and accomplished marathon (and ultra-marathon) runner who won his first marathon at age 39, Heinrich looks deeply at running, aging, and the body, exploring the unresolved relationship between metabolism, diet, exercise, and age. Why do some bodies age differently than others? How much control do we have over that process, and what effect, if any, does being active have?

The creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue reflects on his tumultuous life, driven by a nearly insatiable creative energy and a matching penchant for self-destruction. Life’s Work is a profound memoir from a brilliant mind taking stock as Alzheimer’s loosens his hold on his own past.

Dr. Bonnie Henry has been called "one of the most effective public health figures in the world" by The New York Times. She has been called "a calming voice in a sea of coronavirus madness", and "our hero" in national newspapers. But in the waning days of 2019, when the first rumours of a strange respiratory ailment in Wuhan, China began to trickle into her office in British Columbia, these accolades lay in a barely imaginable future.

Through the intimate writing of critically acclaimed autistic author Kay Kerr, Love & Autism presents an uplifting celebration of neurodivergent love, the search for it and a deeper look into the lives of autistic Australians.

You have seen Robert A. Jensen—you just never knew it. As the owner of the world’s largest disaster management company, he has spent most of his adult life responding to tragedy. From the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and the Bali bombings, to the 2004 South Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, and the Grenfell Tower Fire, Jensen has been at the practical level of international incidents, assisting with the recovery of bodies, identifying victims, and repatriating and returning their personal effects to the surviving family members.

Horrifying, heartbreaking and eye-opening, these are the stories, the patients and the cases that have characterised a career spent behind bars. The no-holds-barred memoirs of a GP who went from working at a quiet suburban practice to treating the country’s most dangerous criminals - first in young offenders’ institutions, then at the notorious Wormwood Scrubs and finally at Europe’s largest women-only prison in Europe, Bronzefield.

This book explores Alzheimer’s disease through the intertwined perspectives of a patient and her devoted caregiver, offering a deeply personal look at the emotional, physical, and mental challenges they face. From the first signs of memory loss to the final days of care, listeners are taken on a raw and honest journey through the daily struggles, heartbreaks, and small victories of providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

Any murder causes pain and suffering that ripple through families and communities - of both the victims and the perpetrators - but premeditated murders cause the worst kind of damage. The Allure of Premeditated Murder is about the worst kinds of premeditated homicide in which the perpetrator plans an attack over a period of days, weeks, or months, leaving behind massive carnage and unspeakable suffering. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with murderers, sociologists Jack Levin and Julie B. Wiest help listeners understand why such vicious murders occur.

For twenty years, James Carville and Mary Matalin have held the mantle of the nation's most politically opposed, ideologically mismatched, and intensely opinionated couple. In this follow-up to their groundbreaking All's Fair: Love, War, and Running for President, Carville and Matalin take a look at how they - and America - have changed in the last two decades. If nothing else, this new collaboration proves that after twenty years of marriage they can still manage to agree on a few things.

For more than a decade, Mahendra Singh Dhoni has captivated the world of cricket and more than a billion Indians with his incredible ingenuity as captain, wicketkeeper, and batsman. Bharat Sundaresan tracks down the cricketer's closest friends in Ranchi and artfully presents the different shades of Dhoni - the Ranchi boy, the fauji, the diplomat, Chennai's beloved Thala, the wicketkeeping Pythagoras - and lays bare the man underneath. He discovers a certain je ne sais quoi about the man who has a magical ability to transform and elevate everything that comes into his orbit.

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.

Into the Gray Zone takes listeners to the edge of a dazzling, humbling frontier in our understanding of the brain: the so-called "gray zone" between full consciousness and brain death. People in this middle place have sustained traumatic brain injuries or are the victims of stroke or degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Many are oblivious to the outside world, and their doctors believe they are incapable of thought.

Wounded traces the journey made by a casualty from the battlefield to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him - stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, orderlies and nurses - from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty. We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home.

Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden.

Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the 20th century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up - usually without due process - simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan", lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness.

A team of firefighters fought to save Heidi’s life after a horrific accident that killed her best friend, burned over 53 percent of Heidi’s body, and claimed both her legs. The following year followed countless surgeries, surviving, pain management, fighting, and loss. Until she finally faces the driver who changed her life, Heidi realizes she has one last hurdle: forgiveness.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

Alongside their personal stories, the writers -decorated novelists, poets, and essayists - address the history of the C-section as well as its risks, social inequities, impact on the body, and psychological aftermath. My Caesarean is a heartfelt meditation, offering much-needed comfort through shared experience.

Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK.

This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.