Health Biographies

At 24 Amy was a typical type-A law student: smart, driven, and highly competitive. With a full course load and a budding romance, it seemed nothing could slow her down...until her heart began to fail. Amy chronicles her harrowing medical journey from the first misdiagnosis to her astonishing recovery, which is made all the more dramatic by the romantic bedside courtship with her future husband and her uncompromising desire to become a mother.

If you’ve ever had a friend, relative, or colleague with cancer, this is the book for you. Wondering what to say, how to help, and/or what to know about your friend with cancer? Now, for the first time, your questions will be answered in this supportive and instructional guide on how to be there for your loved one in his or her time of need.

The Gift of Cancer: A Miraculous Journey to Healing speaks to anyone on a journey of wellbeing, whether suffering from a life-threatening disease or merely desiring to live a better, more fulfilling life. After Brenda's third cancer diagnosis and being told she had a year to live, she boldly stepped away from the accepted medical model, said "no" to chemotherapy, and chose alternative treatment.

Julie fully expected to be breathing at the end of the trip - but driving into Death Valley felt like giving up, surrendering. She'd spent years battling a mysterious illness so extreme that she often couldn't turn over in her bed. The top specialists in the world were powerless to help, and research on her disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, was at a near standstill. Having exhausted the plausible ideas, Julie turned to an implausible one. Going against both her instincts and her training, she followed the advice of strangers she'd met on the Internet.

From the outside, Seana Smith lived an enviable life. An Oxford graduate, a successful career with the BBC and Sydney’s Channel 9, a bestselling author, happily married. But behind this perfect life she had a secret: Seana was a drinker, and alcohol was slowly taking away her life, destroying her health, her emotional well-being, her world. With engaging style and wit, Going Under reveals the true story behind Seana’s lifelong battle with drink. It lays bare a confusing childhood of Scottish sailing adventures and also brutal violence from her bullying, alcoholic father.

This is the enormously entertaining story of how a fraudulent surgeon made a fortune by inserting goats' testes into impotent American men. "Doctor" John Brinkley became a world renowned authority on sexual rejuvenation in the 1920s, with famous politicians and even royalty asking for his services.

When Kerry Cohen reached her early 40s, she realized she had a drinking problem - just enough to blur the edges of her life that had become a monotony of working, carpooling the kids to school, and everyday distractions. What she also realized was that she wasn't the only one. Lush is a gripping memoir that examines Kerry's struggles with alcohol, a struggle that a rising number of middle-aged women are facing. Wonderfully poignant and relatable, Lush follows Kerry as she attempts to rediscover the awe in her life, leaving mistakes, regrets, and the bottle behind her.

Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-ca. 216) began his remarkable career tending to wounded gladiators in provincial Asia Minor. Later in life he achieved great distinction as one of a small circle of court physicians to the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at the very heart of Roman society. Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine offers the first authoritative biography in English of this brilliant, audacious, and profoundly influential figure.

A leading oncologist at the University of California-San Francisco, Dr. Pamela Munster has advised thousands of women on how to deal with the life-altering diagnosis of breast cancer. But when she got a call saying that her own mammogram showed "irregularities", she found herself experiencing a whole new side of the disease she thought she was an expert in. Weaving together her personal story with her team's groundbreaking research on the BRCA gene, Twisting Fate is an inspiring guide to living with BRCA mutations.

Weaving together family history, genetic discovery, and scenes from her life, Ami McKay tells the compelling, true-science story of her own family's unsettling legacy of hereditary cancer while exploring the challenges that come from carrying the mutation that not only killed many people you loved, but might also kill you.

Volume III of Dick Russell’s monumental biography, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, takes up the final decades of the pioneering depth psychologist’s explorations of “Soul in the World.” Hillman’s twenty-three-year relationship and ultimately marriage to visual artist Margot McLean provides the backdrop for the diversity of his wide-ranging pursuits—where the aesthetic and the imagination become central motifs for the founder of archetypal psychology.

Precisely plotting the slippery slope of a heroin addict's existence, The Hummingbird Kiss paints a bleak picture but still manages to offer a ray of hope. The '70s are young, and 18-year-old Trish is a newlywed. When a Florida judge sentences her junkie husband to ten years for stealing stereos, she immediately seeks out a fix, and before she knows it she's hooked. There follows a long sojourn as she and her friends work small scams to score, head to California in search of better highs, move back to Florida, shoot up and nod off every chance they get — until death gets some of them.

As a child, Maggie Downs often doubted that she would ever possess the courage to visit the destinations her mother dreamed of one day seeing. "You are braver than you think," her mother always insisted. That statement would guide her as, over the course of one year, Downs backpacked through seventeen countries - visiting all the places her mother, struck with early-onset Alzheimer's disease, could not visit herself - encountering some of the world's most striking locales while confronting the slow loss of her mother.

Best known for his hysterically funny and often scathing restaurant reviews for the London Sunday Times, journalist Adrian Gill writes about his near-fatal alcoholism in this extraordinary lucid memoir. By his early 20s, at London's prestigious Saint Martin's art school, Gill was entrenched in his addiction. He writes from the handful of memories that remain, of drunken conquests with anonymous women, of waking to morbid hallucinations, of emptying jacket pockets that "were like tiny crime scenes".

My Beautiful Psychosis is a stunning debut memoir from international award winning documentary filmmaker, Emma Goude. It is a gritty tale of transformation, depicting from the inside some of the most powerful experiences a human mind can endure. What if psychosis is really a wake up call? Emma is a 20-something who likes to party and take drugs...until she decides to give them up...and that’s when the insomnia starts. After five nights without sleep she ends up in A&E. Three questions determine whether she is sane or not.

Overwhelmed with insomnia and an incurable autoimmune disease, Shannon Harvey needed to make a change. But while the award-winning health journalist found plenty of recommendations on diet, sleep and exercise, when she looked for the equivalent of a 30-minute workout for her mental well-being, there was nothing. Also worried for the future mental health of her kids, who were growing up amidst critical levels of stress, anxiety, depression and addiction, Shannon enlisted a team of scientists to put meditation to the test.

Madame Restell is a sharp, witty Gilded Age medical history which introduces us to an iconic, yet tragically overlooked, feminist heroine: a glamorous women’s healthcare provider in Manhattan, known to the world as Madame Restell. A celebrity in her day with a flair for high fashion and public, petty beefs, Restell was a self-made woman and single mother who used her wit, her compassion, and her knowledge of family medicine to become one of the most in-demand medical workers in New York.

Cheney flips mental illness inside out, exposing the visceral story of the struggles, stigma, relationship dilemmas, treatments, and recovery techniques she and others have encountered. Sometimes humorous, sometimes harrowing, Modern Madness is the ultimate owner's manual on mental illness, breaking this complex subject down into readily understandable concepts like instructions for use, troubleshooting, maintenance, and warranties.

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.

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.