Health Biographies

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing-yet-fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

In Crossing Over, John brings his listeners with him on the extraordinary journey that has been his life since his New York Times bestseller One Last Time was published in 1998. In the style of his TV show and personal appearances-poignant, funny, and remarkably candid-John deals head-on with...

Lisa Smith was a bright young lawyer at a prestigious law firm in New York City when alcoholism and drug addiction took over her life. What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload. Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith's formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery.

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family's spoons, tried on their underpants, and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions.

How Can I Help? portrays a week in the life of Dr. David Goldbloom as he treats patients, communicates with families, and trains staff at CAMH, the largest psychiatric facility in Canada. This highly listenable and touching behind-the-scenes account of his daily encounters with a wide range of psychiatric concerns - from his own patients and their families to Emergency Department arrivals - puts a human face on an often misunderstood area of medical expertise.

The bestselling author of Lost Connections and Stolen Focus offers a revelatory look at the new drugs transforming weight loss as we know it—from his personal experience on Ozempic to our ability to heal our society’s dysfunctional relationship with food, weight, and our bodies. In January...

While his wife and two-year-old daughter watched TV in the living room, David Poses was in the kitchen, measuring the distance from his index finger to his armpit. He needed to be sure he could pull the trigger with a shotgun barrel in his mouth. Twenty-six inches. Thirty-two years old. More than a decade in a double life fueled by depression and heroin.

Millions of families are affected by eating disorders, which usually strike young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty. But current medical practice ties these families' hands when it comes to helping their children recover. Conventional medical wisdom dictates separating the patient from the family and insists that 'it's not about the food', even as a family watches a child waste away before their eyes.

A political journalist and activist, Cousins was also a professor of medical humanities at UCLA, where he studied the biochemistry of human emotions and their relationship to healing. When Cousins was hospitalized with a debilitating collagen illness, he decided to take his health into his own hands. Cousins and his doctor combated the disease together by creating a regimen of laughter and vitamin C specifically calibrated to his needs. Against all odds, the treatment worked, proving to Cousins that a positive attitude was key to his improvement.

John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of 30, dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards.

Sujette au syndrome d'Asperger et diagnostiquée à l'âge adulte, l'auteure témoigne de son parcours, de ses questionnements et de la relation aux autres qu'entraîne ce trouble du spectre autistique.

Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age 11. In the years that followed, he would regularly smoke pot, do cocaine and ecstasy, and develop addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer in California to convince him otherwise.

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NEW YORKER, PITCHFORK, LITHUB, AND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City "The first...

Mataio (Matt) Faafetai Malietoa Brown offers the men in his barbershop a haircut with a difference: a safe space to be seen and heard without judgement. As the creator of My Fathers Barbers, Matt has inspired a new generation of New Zealand men to break free from the cycle of abuse - and those men have in turn inspired Matt and his wife, Sarah, to create the global anti-violence movement She Is Not Your Rehab.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon...

This raw, untold memoir reveals the real story not covered in Netflix's Orgasm Inc. The story shows how intelligent people get trapped in high-control groups. How the same methods used to help people can be weaponized to control them. How trauma and transformation can be impossible to separate.

Legendary magician Penn Jillette was approaching his 60th birthday. Topping 330 pounds and saddled with a systolic blood pressure reading over 200, he knew he was at a dangerous crossroads: If he wanted to see his small children grow up, he needed to change. And then came Crazy Ray. A former NASA scientist and an unconventional, passionate innovator, Ray Cronise saved Jillette's life with his wild "potato diet". Outspoken, frank, and bitingly clever, Presto is an incisive, rollicking listen.

Perhaps the most unconventional and literally breathtaking father-son story you'll ever read, My Friend Leonard pulls you immediately and deeply into a relationship as unusual as it is inspiring. The father figure is Leonard, the high-living, recovering coke addict, "West Coast Director of a large Italian-American finance firm" (read: mobster) who helped to keep James Frey clean in A Million Little Pieces.

Between December 1968 and October 1969, a hooded serial killer called Zodiac terrorized San Francisco. Claiming responsibility for 37 murders, he manipulated the media with warnings, dares, and bizarre cryptograms that baffled FBI code-breakers. Then, as suddenly as the murders began, Zodiac disappeared into the Bay Area fog. After painstaking investigation and more than 30 years of research, Robert Graysmith finally exposes Zodiac's true identity.

Like many others on the autism spectrum, 20-something stand-up comic Michael McCreary has been told by more than a few well-meaning folks that he doesn’t “look” autistic. But, as he’s quick to point out in this memoir, autism “looks” different for just about everyone with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).