Health Sociology

When thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that as the only woman at her new workplace—a manufacturer of cardboard tubes—she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can’t clear away her coworkers’ dirty cups—because she’s pregnant and the smell nauseates her. Except Ms. Shibata is not pregnant. But she has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Before long, it becomes all-absorbing, and with every stage of her “pregnancy,” the boundary between her lie and her life begins to dissolve.

In this groundbreaking collection, Ruth DyckFehderau and 27 storytellers offer a rich and timely accounting of contemporary life in Eeyou Istchee, the territory of the James Bay Cree of Northern Quebec. The stories are connected by diabetes, but they are not records of illness as much as they are deeply personal accounts of life in the North.

A groundbreaking investigation of how inequality infects our minds and gets under our skin.

Final Exit is the most famous book on voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide. There is unique step-by-step language for the competent adult who is terminally or hopelessly ill to bring their life to a peaceful, non-violent end if they wish. Final Exit outlines the legal complications connected with dying, death, hastened death, euthanasia laws, suicide, living wills, and advance directives. Derek Humphry explores the problems with life insurance, as well as the ethics of double suicide.

Award-winning author Michael Harris examines why our experience of solitude has become so impoverished and how we may grow to love it again in the frenzy of our digital landscape. Solitude is an optimistic and encouraging story about discovering true quiet inside the city, inside the crowd, inside our busy and urbane lives. Harris guides listeners away from a life of ceaseless pings toward a state of measured connectivity, one that balances solitude and companionship.

The national best seller that defines a new economic class and shows how it is key to the future of our cities. The Rise of the Creative Class gives us a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today - and where we might be headed. Weaving storytelling with masses of new and updated research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy.

UFOs are a myth, says David J. Halperin, but myths are real. The power and fascination of the UFO has nothing to do with space travel or life on other planets. It’s about us, our longings and terrors, especially the greatest terror of all: the end of our existence. This is a book about UFOs that goes beyond believing in them or debunking them, to a fresh understanding of what they tell us about ourselves as individuals, as a culture, as a species.

This gripping narrative explores today's scientific pursuit of immortality, with exclusive visits inside Silicon Valley labs and interviews with the visionaries who believe we will soon crack into the aging process and cure death. We live in an age when billionaires are betting their fortunes on laboratory advances to prove aging unnecessary and death a disease that can be cured.

Wendy Mitchell had a busy job with the British National Health Service, raised her two daughters alone, and spent her weekends running and climbing mountains. Then, slowly, a mist settled deep inside the mind she once knew so well, blurring the world around her. She didn’t know it then, but dementia was starting to take hold. In 2014, at age 58, she was diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s. In this groundbreaking book, Mitchell shares the heartrending story of her cognitive decline and how she has fought to stave it off.

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats, and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or 10? They adopt 20.

How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.

This health assessment book for nursing students helps relieve that pressure and anxiety by providing a no fluff, easy-to-understand, full-of-pictures physical assessment that you can easily learn.

Reassuring, honest, funny, and most of all empowering, Great Sex Starts at 50 is the must-have sex and relationships book for men and women hitting half a century with little sign of slowing down. There's no denying that something happens to us sexually at 50. From menopause to the mixed blessing of Viagra to other challenges that go beyond the physical: How do you ignite desire after decades with the same person?

Claude M. Steele, who has been called “one of the few great social psychologists,” offers a vivid first-person account of the research that supports his groundbreaking conclusions on stereotypes and identity. He sheds new light on American social phenomena from racial and gender gaps in test scores to the belief in the superior athletic prowess of black men, and lays out a plan for mitigating these “stereotype threats” and reshaping American identities.

As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us - political, social, religious - Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren't thinking.

Multiple studies have now confirmed a dramatic link between the health of our microbiome—the trillions of bacteria that live in our digestive tract—and our likelihood of getting devastating viral illnesses like COVID-19. Low-fiber diets, limited exposure to nature, and overzealous use of pharmaceuticals have messed up our microbiome, making many of us more susceptible to viruses than we naturally should be.

Considered the definitive history of the American healthcare system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine examines how the roles of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs have evolved over the last two and a half centuries. Updated with a new preface and an epilogue analyzing developments since the early 1980s, this new edition is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of our fraught healthcare system.

Dr. Arline T. Geronimus coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of systemic oppression—including racism and classism—on the body. In Weathering, based on more than 30 years of research, she argues that health and aging have more to do with how society treats us than how well we take care of ourselves. She explains what happens to human bodies as they attempt to withstand and overcome the challenges and insults that society leverages at them, and details how this process ravages their health. And she proposes solutions.

Nobody affects us as deeply as our brothers and sisters - not parents, not children, not friends. From the time we - and they - are born, our siblings are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and cautionary tales. They teach us how to resolve conflicts and how not to, how to conduct friendships and when to walk away.

The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it's more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it.