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| Title | Author | Publisher | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Gene | Siddhartha Mukherjee | Scribner | Framing his story are pieces of his own family history: His cousin and two of his uncles “suffered from various unravelings of the mind,” and the specter of mental illness, presumably inherited or inheritable, haunts his family and his imagination. The books form a magnificent pair. “The Emperor of All Maladies” is, as Mukherjee notes, the story of the genetic code corrupted, tipping into malignancy. The new book, then, serves as its prequel. New York Times Bestseller | New York Times Notable Book | Washington Post Best Book of the Year | Seattle Times Best Book of the Year |
| The Golden Hour | Niki Smith | Little, Brown and Company | Struggling with anxiety after witnessing a harrowing instance of gun violence, Manuel Soto copes through photography, using his cell-phone camera to find anchors that keep him grounded. His days are a lonely, latchkey monotony until he's teamed with his classmates, Sebastian and Caysha, for a group project. 2021 Kirkus Prize Finalist • A Kirkus Best Book of 2021 • An SLJ Best Book of 2021 |
| The Great Believers | Rebecca Makkai | Viking | In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for a Chicago art gallery, is about to pull off a coup, bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago epidemic, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways the AIDS crisis affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. Yale and Fiona’s intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of ’80s and the chaos of the modern world, as both struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize | Finalist for the National Book Award | Winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal | Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize | Winner of the ALA Stonewall Award | Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize | Winner of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association Award | Winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award | Finalist for the Vermont Book Award | New York Times Ten Best Books of 2018 |
| The Hospital | Brian Alexander | St Martin's Press | Bryan, Ohio's hospital, is losing money, making it vulnerable to big health systems seeking domination and Phil Ennen, CEO, has been fighting to preserve its independence. Meanwhile, Bryan, a town of 8,500 people in Ohio's northwest corner, is still trying to recover from the Great Recession. As local leaders struggle to address the town's problems, and the hospital fights for its life amid a rapidly consolidating medical and hospital industry, a 39-year-old diabetic literally fights for his limbs, and a 55-year-old contractor lies dying in the emergency room. With these and other stories, Alexander strips away the wonkiness of policy to reveal Americans' struggle for health against a powerful system that's stacked against them, but yet so fragile it blows apart when the pandemic hits. Culminating with COVID-19, this book offers a blueprint for how we created the crisis we're in. BEST OF THE 2022 RUSA Book & Media AWARDS | One of Biblioracle’s 8 favorite nonfiction books of 2021 in the Chicago Tribune | The New York Post's BEST BOOKS OF 2021 | USA Today's 5 BOOKS NOT TO MISS |
| The House of My Mother | Shari Franke | Gallery Books | From Shari Franke, the shocking true story behind the viral family vlog, 8 Passengers, is revealed. Shari, the eldest daughter of the convicted YouTube star (Ruby Franke), writes of the hidden abuse she suffered from her family’s devastating involvement with Jodi Hildebrandt, and how, in the face of unimaginable pain, she found freedom and healing. INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER |
| The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot | Broadway Books | Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. |
| The Invisible Kingdom | Meghan O'Rourke | Penguin Random House | Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O'Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color. A New York Times Bestseller | Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction |
| The Joy of Sweat | Sarah Everts | W W Norton & Company | Everts’s entertaining investigation takes readers around the world—from Moscow, where she participates in a dating event in which people sniff sweat in search of love, to New Jersey, where companies hire trained armpit sniffers to assess the efficacy of their anti-sweat products. Along the way, Everts traces humanity’s long quest to control sweat, culminating in the multibillion-dollar industry for deodorants and antiperspirants. And she shows that while sweating can be annoying, our sophisticated temperature control strategy is one of humanity’s most powerful biological traits. A New York Times most anticipated book of Summer 2021 | 2021 Science Book Pick, Outside Magazine | 10 Best Science Books of 2021, Smithsonian |
| The Last Devil To Die | Richard Osman | Penguin Random House | From the fourth installment in the New York Times bestselling series, shocking news reaches the gang—an old friend has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. The gang's search leads them into the antiques business, where the tricks of the trade are as old as the objects themselves. As they encounter drug dealers, art forgers, and online fraudsters—as well as heartache close to home—Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim have no idea whom to trust. With the body count rising, the clock ticking down, and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die? |
| The Least of Us | Sam Quiñones | Bloomsbury Publishing | Sam Quiñones was among the first to see the dangers of synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths--at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent. He investigated these new threats, discovering how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. Amid a landscape of despair, Quinones found hope in those embracing the forgotten and ignored, illuminating the striking truth that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable. Apple Best Books of 2021 | Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction | Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal | Shortlisted for the Zocalo Book Prize |