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As we confront the challenges of emerging diseases, environmental health threats, and gaps in health equity, medical professionals need versatile communication tools that help people make informed decisions and engage them in constructive conversations about the health of their communities. This book illuminates the power of comics to meet that need. Each chapter focuses on the use of graphic public health in the context of four specific goals: health literacy, risk communication, health promotion, and advocacy. Li-Vollmer also includes guidance for practitioners getting started in creating comics for any form of public information, and especially for public health.

Gray Love narrates stories about the most common themes – searching for and (perhaps) finding love. Forty-five men and women between ages 60 and 94 from diverse backgrounds talk about dating, starting or ending a relationship, embracing life alone or enjoying a partnered one. The longing for connection as old age encroaches is palpable here, with more and more senior singles searching online. Those who find new partners explore issues that most relationships encounter at any age, as well as some that are unique to elder relationships. These include having had previous partners and a complicated and deep personal history; family and friends’ reactions to an older person’s dating; alternative models to marriage (such as sharing space or living apart); having more than one partner at the same time; one’s aging body, appearance, and sexuality; and the pressure of time and the specter of illness and death.  

When Kinari Webb first traveled to Indonesian Borneo at age 21 to study orangutans, she was both awestruck by the beauty of her surroundings and heartbroken by the rainforest destruction she witnessed. As she got to know the local communities, she realized that their need to pay for expensive healthcare led directly to rampant logging, which in turn imperiled their health and safety even further. Dr. Webb realized her true calling was at the intersection of medicine and conservation.

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This memoir takes readers on adventures around the world: from Eritrea and Ethiopia to building a school under the scorching Saharan sun to training with a guide dog in New Jersey, climbing an iceberg in Alaska, fighting for blind readers at a courthouse in Vermont, and talking with President Obama at The White House. Warm, funny, thoughtful, and uplifting, this captivating book is a testament to Haben’s determination to resist isolation and find the keys to connection.

A New York Times “New & Noteworthy” Pick, an Oprah Magazine “Book of the Month” favorite, and a Publishers Weekly Bestseller

From the mammogram that would change her life through her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, New York Times bestselling author Theresa Brown, RN, tells a poignant and powerful story about having breast cancer in her book, Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient. Despite her training and years of experience as a cancer and hospice nurse, Brown finds it difficult to navigate the medical maze from the other side of the bed. She relays the unforgettable details of her daily life—the needles, the chemo drugs, the rubber gloves, the bureaucratic frustrations—but this time from her new perch as a patient, looking back at some of her own cases and considering what she didn’t know then about the warping effects of fear and the healing virtues of compassion.

For centuries, the human heart seemed beyond our understanding: an inscrutable shuddering mass that was the spark of life as well as somehow the driver of emotion and the seat of the soul. As the cardiologist and bestselling author Sandeep Jauhar shows in Heart, it was only recently that we demolished age-old taboos and developed the science to change the way we live. Deftly weaving together his own experiences with the defining discoveries of the past, Jauhar tells the colorful and little-known story of the doctors who risked their careers and the patients who risked their lives to know and heal this most vital organ.  

A PBS NewsHour-New York Times Now Read This book club pick

Rosalind Franklin knows if she just takes one more X-ray picture--one more after thousands--she can unlock the building blocks of life. Never again will she have to listen to her colleagues complain about her, especially Maurice Wilkins who'd rather conspire about genetics with James Watson and Francis Crick than work alongside her. Then it finally happens--the double helix structure of DNA reveals itself to her with perfect clarity. But what happens next, Rosalind could have never predicted. Marie Benedict's next powerful novel shines a light on a woman who died to discover our very DNA, a woman whose contributions were suppressed by the men around her but whose relentless drive advanced our understanding of humankind.

In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka's teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett's family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett's life. His father is a mystery; Jarrett doesn't know where to find him, or even what his name is. Jarrett lives with his grandparents, two very loud, very loving, very opinionated people who had thought they were through with raising children until Jarrett came along. Jarrett goes through his childhood trying to make his non-normal life as normal as possible, finding a way to express himself through drawing even as so little is being said to him about what's going on. Only as a teenager can Jarrett begin to piece together the truth of his family, reckoning with his mother and tracking down his father. Hey, Kiddo is a profoundly important memoir about growing up in a family grappling with addiction and finding the art that helps you survive. 

A National Book Award Finalist | All Iowa Reads

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author, Robert Kolker, uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

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Holiday SOS is Doctor Ben MacFarlane's story. His job is to bring people back to Britain after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head off overseas. Follow Ben as he grabs his medical bag and flies to pick up the pieces after another holiday emergency. Dramatic, hilarious and wildly unexpected, emergency medicine doesn’t just take place in intensive care wards – it can happen just across the aisle on your next flight.