Health Biographies

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.

“Strokes are the third-leading cause of death in America, and for the ‘lucky’ stroke victims who don’t die, about half will spend the rest of their lives trying to recover.” Roughly 700,000 American suffer a stroke each year and around 140,000 of them are fatal. Different Strokes is an in-depth look at what surviving, or not surviving, a stroke can mean.

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity - by chewing, brewing, and snorting - some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze Age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in her best-selling memoir, Some Girls. In her 30s, Jillian's most radical act is learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs.

Pete Sampras is arguably the greatest tennis player ever, a man whose hard-nosed work ethic led to an unprecedented number one world ranking for 286 weeks, and whose prodigious talent made possible a record-setting fourteen Grand Slam titles. While his more vocal rivals sometimes grabbed the...

In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children fall into a state that resembles sleep for months or years at a time. In Le Roy, a town in upstate New York, teenage girls develop involuntary twitches and seizures that spread like a conta­gion. In the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, employees experience headaches...

Diario de una ninfómana es el conmovedor relato de una mujer francesa, de buena familia, licenciada en dirección de empresas, que narra su evolución vital a través de las relaciones sexuales que va teniendo: con los sepultureros de un cementerio, con un árabe muy aficionado a la Coca-Cola, con un policía sin escrúpulos, con desconocidos en lugares imprevistos... Multitud de vivencias que asume con la máxima libertad que tiene cualquier persona: la que uno se concede a sí mismo y no la que se ve obligado a tener.

A scathing reexamination of the lives of nine female celebrities in the 2000s, and the sexist, exploitative culture that took them down Welcome to celebrity culture in the early aughts: the reign of Perez Hilton, celebrity sex tapes, and dueling tabloids fed by paparazzi who were willing to do...

"When are you having kids?" "Why don't you just adopt?" These innocent, well-meaning questions are ones everyone asks couples, especially women of a certain age. To those one in eight couples who undergo infertility treatments, these questions do not feel at all innocent or well-meaning, but invalidating to the battle they're fighting and the difficulty and pain involved in the adoption process. This is the story of how Justine Froelker redefined her childless life and learned to be okay, whole, and happy with a full child-free life.

With four young daughters and a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country, to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her daughters. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic relationship so intense they barely know where one begins and the other leaves off. They

This audio download collection of Marianne Williamson's audio recordings includes her popular lectures on manifesting abundance. This collection of live lectures includes: Surrender All Things/Spiritual Truth Principles of Manifesting/Letting God Lead Manifesting Miracles/Living Your...

A grieving widow discovers a most unexpected form of healing—hunting for mushrooms. “Moving . . . Long tells the story of finding hope after despair lightly and artfully, with self-effacement and so much gentle good nature.”—The New York Times Long Litt Woon met Eiolf a month after...

A revelatory exposé of modern tennis—the world's most competitive, physically and mentally grueling sport—The Cruelest Game reveals the inside stories of the current legends and tomorrow's young stars, with never-before-reported stories of their struggles and accomplishments on and off the...

The perfect follow-up to You Are Not Alone: a guide for parents, educators, caregivers, and mental health professionals on how to navigate mental healthcare for the young people in their lives. A growing number of children and teens in the U.S. are struggling with mental health conditions, but...

An extraordinary hybrid memoir by writer and broadcaster Tara McGuire, Holden, After and Before melds truth and fiction, as Tara tries to grapple with the loss of her son, Holden, after he died from an accidental opioid overdose. At once, McGuire creates a contemporary coming-of-age story, along...

Backbone is a life-fulfilling message about managing chronic pain and living a life of purpose. For two decades, Karen Duffy, New York Times bestselling author, former MTV VJ, Revlon model, and actress, has managed to live an enriching life despite living in a state of constant pain. In this powerful, inspirational, funny, and important manual for surviving pain, Duffy draws on her experience as a patient advocate, trained recreational therapist, and hospice chaplain to illuminate gratifying methods people can use to cope with chronic pain.

An estimated 50 million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s erase parts of one’s memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don’t simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging....

You'll find a new level of comfort, safety, and clarity as you listen to these four uniquely powerful meditations from world-renowned psychic and best-selling author Sylvia Browne. Discover that angels and guides are real, and that they're attending to you at all times. With these healing...

Punching Bag is the compelling true story of a high school career defined by poverty and punctuated by outbreaks of domestic abuse. Rex Ogle, who brilliantly mapped his experience of hunger in Free Lunch, here describes his struggle to survive; reflects on his complex, often paradoxical relationship with his passionate, fierce mother; and charts the trajectory of his stepdad’s anger. Hovering over Rex’s story is the talismanic presence of his unborn baby sister.