biography & autobiography / medical

"The author of the bestselling "The Reason I Jump" returns with a...memoir about life as a young adult with severe autism. With an introduction by David Mitchell, who translated this book with his wife, KA Yoshida, this...new work explores education, identity, family, society, and personal growth, opening a window into the mind of its nonverbal author and providing...insights into autism in general"--Provided by publisher.

"A deeply moving memoir about two lives that were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future. Five months pregnant, on a flight to their "babymoon," Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange, and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave--a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident--had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting to hear if her husband would survive the night. When Dave woke up, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. Allison lost the Dave she knew and loved when he lost consciousness on the plane. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, struggling with the fear of what was to come. As a way to make sense of the pain and chaos of their new reality, Allison started to write daily letters to Dave. Not only would she work to make sense of the unfathomable experiences unfolding around her, but her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own. She was writing to preserve their past, protect their present, and fight for their future. Those letters became the foundation for this beautiful, intimate memoir. And in the process, she fell in love with her husband all over again. This is a manifesto for living, an ultimately uplifting story about the transformative power of faith and resilience. It's a tale of a husband's turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places"--.

"A . . . memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery that details author Porochista Khakpour struggles with late-stage Lyme disease"--Provided by publisher.

Dr. Steven Hatch came to Liberia in November 2013, to work at a hospital in Monrovia. Six months later, several of the physicians Dr. Hatch had mentored and served with were dead, or barely clinging to life, and Ebola had become a world health emergency. With little help from the international community and a population ravaged by disease and fear, the war-torn African nation was simply unprepared to deal with the catastrophe. A physician's memoir, this book is also an explanation of the science and biology of Ebola---how it is transmitted and spread with such ferocity. While Ebola is temporarily under control, it will inevitably re-emerge, as will other plagues, notably the Zika virus, which the World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency.

"The phone rings. The doctor from California is on the line. "Are you ready Amanda?" The two people Amanda Baxley loves the most had begged her not to be tested-at least, not now. But she had to find out. If your family carried a mutated gene that foretold a brutal illness and you were offered the chance to find out if you'd inherited it, would you do it? Would you walk toward the problem, bravely accepting whatever answer came your way? Or would you avoid the potential bad news as long as possible? In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times science reporter and bestselling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an almost archetypal family in a small town in South Carolina. A proud and determined clan, many of them doctors, they are struck one by one with an inscrutable illness. They finally discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of events that many saw as providential. Meanwhile, science, progressing for a half a century along a parallel track, had handed the Baxleys a resolution-not a cure, but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease and who did not. And science would offer another dilemma-fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children through an expensive process. A work of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Mercies in Disguise is the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when the medical world abandoned them. It's a story of a family that had to deal with unspeakable tragedy and yet did not allow it to tear them apart. And it is the story of a young woman-Amanda Baxley-who faced the future head on, determined to find a way to disrupt her family's destiny. "--.

"The surprising, behind-the-scenes story of how our medicines are discovered, told by a veteran drug hunter. The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity-- by chewing, brewing, and snorting--some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Otzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze-age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings. Nowadays, Big Pharma conglomerates spend billions of dollars on state-of the art laboratories staffed by PhDs to discover blockbuster drugs. Yet, despite our best efforts to engineer cures, luck, trial-and-error, risk, and ingenuity are still fundamental to medical discovery. Drug Hunters is a colorful, fact-filled narrative history of the search for new medicines from our Neolithic forebears to the professionals of today, and from quinine and aspirin to Viagra, Prozac, and Lipitor. The chapters offer a lively tour of how new drugs are actually found, the discovery strategies, the mistakes, and the rare successes. Dr. Donald R. Kirsch infuses the book with his own expertise and experiences from thirty-five years of drug hunting, whether searching for life-saving molecules in mudflats by Chesapeake Bay or as a chief science officer and research group leader at major pharmaceutical companies"--.

Dr. Vincent Di Maio, a veteran medical examiner, explores the complicated forensic cases of the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald to the complex shooting of Trayvon Martin.

At nineteen years old, Nicole C. Kear's biggest concern was choosing a major--until she walked into a doctor's office in midtown Manhattan and got a life-changing diagnosis. She was going blind, courtesy of an eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and has only a decade or so before it happens. Kear decides to carpe diem (seize the day) and make the most of the vision she has left. She joins circus school, tears through boyfriends, travels the world, and keeps her vision loss a secret. When Kear becomes a mother, just a few years shy of her vision's expiration date, she amends her strategy, giving up recklessness in order to relish every moment with her kids. Her secret, though, is harder to surrender - and as her vision deteriorates one thing becomes clear: no matter how hard she fights, she won't win the battle against blindness. But if she comes clean with her secret, and comes to terms with the loss, she can still win her happy ending.

Dr. Peter Grinspoon seemed to be a total success: a Harvard-educated M.D. with a thriving practice; married with two great kids and a gorgeous wife; a pillar of his community. But lurking beneath the thin veneer of having it all was an addict fueled on a daily boatload of prescription meds. When the police finally came calling--after a tip from a sharp-eyed pharmacist--Grinspoon's house of cards came tumbling down fast. His professional ego turned out to be an impediment to getting clean as he cycled through recovery to relapse, his reputation, family life, and lifestyle in ruins. Finally what moves him to recover and reclaim life, is working with other physicians who themselves are addicts.

"A young doctor stumbles through his experience as a first year intern at a major New York hospital"--Provided by publisher.