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In 2007 John Elder Robison wrote the international bestseller Look Me in the Eye, a memoir about growing up with Asperger’s syndrome. Amid the blaze of publicity that followed, he received a unique invitation: Would John like to take part in a study led by one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, who would use an experimental new brain therapy known as TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, in an effort to understand and then address the issues at the heart of autism? Switched On is the extraordinary story of what happened next as a research subject in a brain study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital at Harvard Medical School.

Review

Senior, Jennifer. "In Switched On, John Elder Robison's Asperger's Brain Is Changed." The New York Times Books. March 20, 2016

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients.

A graphic memoir and adapted oral history of Unit 371, an inpatient AIDS care hospital unit in Chicago that was in existence from 1985 to 2000. Examines the human costs of caregiving and the role art can play in the grieving process.   

JAMA Best of Graphic Medicine 2017

Teeth takes readers on a journey into America's silent epidemic of oral disease, exposing the hidden connections between tooth decay and stunted job prospects, low educational achievement, decreased social mobility, and the troubling state of our public health. Teeth reveals that toothaches are not an occasional inconvenience, but rather a chronic reality for millions of people, including disproportionate numbers of the elderly and people of color. Otto also goes back in time to understand the roots of our predicament in the history of dentistry, showing how it became separated from mainstream medicine, despite a century of growing evidence that oral health and general bodily health are closely related.

NPR Best Book of 2017

Rebecca is white, and Priscilla is black, and through their relationship, Rebecca finds herself confronting, for the first time, the blind spots of her own privilege. She feels profoundly connected to the woman who essentially taught her what it means to be a mother. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca steps forward to adopt the baby. But she is unprepared for what it means to be a white mother with a black son. As she soon learns, navigating motherhood for her is a matter of learning how to raise two children whom she loves with equal ferocity, but whom the world is determined to treat differently.

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

An African American emergency room physician reflects on how “the chaos of emergency medicine” helped her come to terms with a painful past and understand the true nature of healing.

New York Times Bestseller

A dramatic account of how 19th-century Quaker surgeon Joseph Lister developed an antiseptic method that indelibly changed medicine. The story describes the practices and risks of early operating theaters as well as the belief systems of Lister's contemporaries.

• Winner of the 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing
• Shortlisted for the 2018 Welcome Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson Prize
• Entertainment Weekly’s Best New Books of 2017
• Daily Mail, Guardian and Observer Books of the Year 2017
• Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly
• Spiegel Bestseller

In a series of short, distinctive chapters, Zemach shares her personal Deafhood journey, poignant scenes from the classroom, shocking individualized education meetings and their impact, and the larger political and historical picture surrounding Deaf education.  

If you are a visual learner, beginning gardener, looking for something new, or have struggled to grow vegetables in the past, you’ll find this uniquely illustrated format ideal with gardening concepts from proper planting techniques to building raised beds. Like having your own personal gardening mentor at your side, The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food is the story of Mia, an eager young professional who wants to grow her own vegetables but doesn’t know where to start, and George, her retired neighbor who loves gardening and walks her through each step of the process. Throughout the book, “cheat sheets” sum up George’s key facts and techniques, providing a quick reference for anyone starting their first vegetable garden, including how to find the best location, which vegetables are easiest to grow, how to pick out the healthiest plants at the store, when (and when not) to water, how to protect your plants from pests, and what to do with extra produce if you grow too much.