Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can't move. She can't speak. She can't open her eyes. Though she can hear everyone around her, no one knows because she's in a coma. But she doesn't remember what happened. And she has a sneaking suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, the narratives build and collide for an...

An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering.

"How to Prevent Dementia begins with the principle that the more we know about dementia, the easier it is to prevent or delay it. A better foundation of knowledge also helps people to understand and interact thoughtfully with family members and other loved ones who may have Alzheimer's and other dementias. Dr. Restak examines the basic thinking of normal everyday people and progresses to people with thinking disorders. In understanding that dementias...

"Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children's forgiveness after recovering...

A New York City sex therapist describes her work with male clients who sought greater self-awareness and improved sex lives, in a guide that draws on true cases to offer insight into how real men feel about sex, desire, and love.

In the shadow of very great loss, the only way to live with passion is truly, madly, deeply. When eighteen-year-old Tommy Baxter declares to his family that he wants to be a police officer after graduation, his mother, Reagan, won't hear of it. After all, she's still mourning the death of her own father on September 11 and she's determined to keep her son safe from danger and disaster. But Tommy's father, Luke Baxter, is proud of Tommy's decision,...

""Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?" wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history's ghosts, they have been revived at last by Maud Casey in City of Incurable Women as complex, flesh-and-blood people, dispossessed and marginalized due to their gender and class but with their own stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and re-imagined, poignantly...

"There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road-there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven-stood the figure of a solitary woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments."-from the book Thus young Walter Hartright first meets the mysterious woman in white in what soon became one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century. Secrets, mistaken identities, surprise revelations, amnesia, locked rooms...

Family caregivers are the unsung heroes of the life-saving drama that's triggered by a cancer diagnosis. Nearly three quarters of American households will find themselves caring for a cancer patient at one point in their lives. This book is the first to capture their thoughts, feelings, and insights on a large scale. It is based on 86 formal interviews with non-professional caregivers (some of whom are cancer survivors themselves), covering 107 patients...