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A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

Spanish edition
Desmorir: Una reflexión sobre la enfermedad en un mundo capitalista | Anne Boyer (Author) and Patricia Gonzalo de Jesus (Translator) | Editorial Sexto Piso | 2021 | 250 pages | ISBN: 978-8417517885 | WorldCat

From Emma Heming Willis, wife of Bruce Willis, a deeply personal and richly compassionate supportive guide that helps caregivers care for themselves while they navigate a loved one’s dementia. With The Unexpected Journey, Emma has written the book she wishes she’d been handed on the day of Bruce’s diagnosis. Weaving her personal journey as a care partner with the latest research and insights from the world’s top dementia, caregiving, and integrative experts she offers the guidance and wisdom caregivers everywhere so desperately need to hear.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it - a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining. Motherhood, marriage, the immigrant experience, ambition, love, wanderlust, tennis, fortune-tellers, grief, reincarnation, jealousy, comfort, pain, the marvel of the body in full rebellion - this book is as sprawling and majestic as the life it records. It is inspiring and instructive, delightful and shattering. It is a book of indelible moments, seared deep - an incomparable guide to living vividly by facing hard truths consciously.

New York Times Bestseller

As humans have struggled to define, treat, and control addictive behaviour, stigma and controversy have been the only constants. The author draws on his own experience as both a psychiatrist of addiction and a recovering alcoholic as he traces the history of an old phenomenon hard to define or responsibly address. He covers a history that probes not only medicine and science but also policy, literature, religion, and sociology. This volume illuminates the extent to which the story of addiction has persistently reflected broader questions of what it means to be human and to take care of one another. Fisher introduces the physicians, activists, politicians, researchers, and writers who have struggled to understand and solve this complex condition. He also examines the treatments and strategies that have produced positive results for many addicts--himself included--lighting the way forward for those whose lives addiction threatens to destroy.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe

Meredith Wadman discusses the epic and controversial story of a major breakthrough in cell biology that led to the conquest of rubella and other devastating diseases. Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a devastating German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella. The rubella vaccine and others made with those fetal cells have protected more than 150 million people in the United States, the vast majority of them preschoolers. The new cells and the method of making them also led to vaccines that have protected billions of people around the world from polio, rabies, chickenpox, measles, hepatitis A, shingles, and adenovirus.

In his memoir, David chronicles his struggle to overcome mental illness and addiction. By age nineteen, he'd been through medical detox, inpatient rehab, twelve-step programs, and a halfway house. He saw his drug use as a symptom of depression, but the experts insisted that addiction was the problem. Over the next thirteen years, he went from one relapse to the next, drowning in guilt, shame, and secrets, until he finally found an evidence-based treatment that not only saved his life, but helped him thrive. With grit, humor, and brutal honesty, David's story exposes the danger in traditional recovery models: they actually increase stigma and the risk of overdose, relapse, and death.

2022 International Book Award in Addiction & Recovery | 2022 Indie Excellence Award in Addiction & Recovery | 2022 Memoir Book Prize in Addiction & Recovery | 2022 Independent Press Award in Addiction & Recovery

The Wellness Trap delves into the persistent, systemic problems with that industry, offering insight into its troubling pattern of cultural appropriation and its destructive views on mental health, and shedding light on how a growing distrust of conventional medicine has led ordinary people to turn their backs on science. Weaving together history, memoir, reporting, and practical advice, Harrison illuminates the harms of wellness culture while re-imagining our society’s relationship with well-being.  

The Wellness Trap delves into the persistent, systemic problems with that industry, offering insight into its troubling pattern of cultural appropriation and its destructive views on mental health, and shedding light on how a growing distrust of conventional medicine has led ordinary people to turn their backs on science. Weaving together history, memoir, reporting, and practical advice, Harrison illuminates the harms of wellness culture while re-imagining our society’s relationship with well-being.

Through the stories of their ancestors, Bush and Kemp take us on a compelling journey through African American history into the hearts of individual lives. In tracing their ancestral roots, these family historians discover their connections to some of the South's most powerful men, both famous and forgotten. The community at the heart of this historical study is Edgefield, South Carolina, yet the stories in this book form a microcosm of events experienced by black communities throughout the South. An enslaved maternal line is traced to 1799; hopes are raised, then dashed, when a family of freedmen acquires land after the Civil War, only to later lose it; the "Dark Corner" of Edgefield is exposed. Shining a bright, sometimes uncomfortable light, deep truths are unearthed through DNA results and a new family is found. Follow the authors through years of meticulous genealogical research, historical settings, and DNA testing as they reclaim their family stories and inspire others to embark on their own journey of discovery.

Award Finalist, 2018 Best Book Award, History: United States | Co-Winner of SCAAHC's 2017 Project Award

Review

Just Finished Reading - There Is Something About Edgefield. Random Thoughts on History by Tim Talbott. December 19, 2017

A probing, witty, and deeply insightful history of blindness - in Western culture and literature, and in the author's own experience - that ranges from Homer to Milton to Braille to Stevie Wonder. M. Leona Godin begins her fascinating, wide-ranging study with an exploration of how the idea of sight is inextricably linked with knowledge and understanding; how "blindness" has, for millennia, been used as a metaphor for ignorance; and how, in metaphorical terms, blindness can also be made to suggest a door to artistic or spiritual transcendence. And she makes clear how all of this has obscured the reality of blindness, as a consequence of which many blind people have to deal not just with their disability but also with expectations of "specialness." Godin illuminates the often surprising history of both the physiological condition and of the ideas that have attached to it. She incorporates analysis of blindness in art and literature (from King Lear to Star Wars) and in culture (assumptions of the blind as pure and magically wise) with the science of blindness and key developments in accessibility (the white cane, seeing eye dogs, eBooks), and with her own experience of gradually losing sight over the course of three decades. Altogether, she gives us a revelation of the centrality of blindness and vision to humanity's understanding of itself and the world.