health

Just after her eleventh birthday in 1950 and at the height of the frightening childhood polio epidemic, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia. It was a place famously founded by FDR, "a perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children." There the young Shreve meets Joey Buckley, paralyzed from the waist down and determined to leave Warm Springs able to play football. The dual shocks of first love and separation from her fiercely protective mother propel Shreve careening between bad girl rebellion to overachieving saint. This portrait of the psychic fallout of childhood illness ends with a shocking collision between adolescent drive and genteel institution. During Shreve's stay at Warm Springs, the Salk vaccine was discovered; Shreve is one of the last generation of Americans to have survived childhood polio.--From publisher description.

The author relates her search to uncover details of her mother's illness and eventual death in 1956, a victim of the polio epidemic that swept the country in the 1940s and 1950s, interspersing her personal story with reporting on the social and historical impact of the disease.

A memoir of Ashok Rajamani, who at the age of twenty-five suffered from an brain aneurysm, which he thankfully survived despite continuing physical and emotional problems.

The author shares her childhood diaries, chronicling her experiences as an eleven-year-old anorexic.

Presents selections from the diaries of mother and daughter Linda and Tara Rio that provide insights into their thoughts and feelings in the years before Tara developed an eating disorder and continuing through her treatment and therapy, and includes advice and commentary from Craig Johnson, Ph.D., president of the National Eating Disorders Association.

A dual autobiography where a father and son discuss their war experiences in Vietnam and how the tragedy of cancer caused byAgent Orange has affected their lives.

The author provides an account of her struggles with eating disorders throughout high school, college, and adulthood, and discusses how she finally was able to come to grips with the issues that led her to starve her body.