Leonie Howie and Adele Robertson live and work on remote Great Barrier Island-so called because it faces the full brunt of the wild Pacific weather and acts as a barrier for the mainland about 100 kilometres away. With a population of about 1000, no reticulated electricity, no ATM machine, no street lights and one pub, this is a wildly beautiful place. It has a long history of farming, whaling and fishing, and the people who live here are a resilient lot, proud of their community.M...

An impassioned, tender, and joyous memoir by the author of Musicophilia and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As ...

“It’s tempting Providence, it is!” he kept saying. “Sail this here ship on Friday the thirteenth? With all them blinkin’ mines still loose in the sea? It’s only askin’ for trouble, that’s all!” This was the warning given to Nurse Myra Grimsley in 1921 prior to her departure from England to her new assignment in Newfoundland. In May of that year, she arrived in the small fishing hamlet of Daniel’s Harbour, which remained her home for the rest of her life. Here she became the only medical he...

**A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA remarkable story about the power of friendship.**Chosen by Essence to be among the forty most influential African Americans, the three doctors grew up in the streets of Newark, facing city life’s temptations, pitfalls, even jail. But one day these three young men made a pact. They promised each other they would all become doctors, and stick it out together through the long, difficult journey to attaining that dream. Sampson D...

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. Ötzi the Iceman, the five-thousand-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipw...

Katrina Firlik is a neurosurgeon, one of only two hundred or so women among the alpha males who dominate this high-pressure, high-prestige medical specialty. She is also a superbly gifted writer–witty, insightful, at once deeply humane and refreshingly wry. In Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, Dr. Firlik draws on this rare combination to create a neurosurgeon’s Kitchen Confidential–a unique insider’s memoir of a fascinating profession.Neurosurgeons are renowned for their big egos an...

Have you ever been locked in a cooler with piles of decomposing humans for so long that you had to shave all the hair off your body in order to get rid of the smell? Joseph Scott Morgan did. Have you ever lit a Marlboro from the ignited gas of a bloated dead man's belly? Joseph Scott Morgan has. Have you ever wept over a dead dog while not giving a shit about the dead owner laying next him? Morgan did. Were you named after a murder victim? Joseph Scott Morgan was.This isn't Hollywo...

A Buddhist nun shares her profound journey of healing, plus step-by-step directions for embracing and transforming suffering through mindfulness, meditation, and other techniquesBefore she became a Buddhist nun in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, Sister Dang Nghiem was a doctor. She’d traveled far in her 43 years. Born during the Tet Offensive and part of the amnesty for Amerasian children of the late 1970s, Dang Nghiem arrived in this country virtually penniless ...

In Autobiography of a Baby Boomer you'll follow the journey of a post-modernist baby-boomer from Father Knows Best middle class Fair Lawn, New Jersey to the hippy trail through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The overland journey in search of something more than he could find at Cornell University Medical College covers four years during a time when "dropping out," "turning on," and "free-love" were the gospel. Through his travels, drugs, séances, very far-out "Road People,...

From the author of How We Die, the extraordinary story of the development of modern medicine, told through the lives of the physician-scientists who paved the way.How does medical science advance? Popular historians would have us believe that a few heroic individuals, possessing superhuman talents, lead an unselfish quest to better the human condition. But as renowned Yale surgeon and medical historian Sherwin B. Nuland shows in this brilliant collection o...

Adeptly navigating between elegy and celebration, fear and determination, confusion and clarity, DeBaggio delivers an exquisitely moving and inspiring book that will resonate with all those who have grappled with their own or their loved ones' memory loss and with death.With his first memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio stunned readers by laying bare his faltering mind in a haunting and beautiful meditation on the centrality of memory to human life, an...

The brand-new final chapter from the revised edition of CURE UNKNOWN, the definitive, award-winning investigation into Lyme diseaseSince its original publication in 2008, CURE UNKNOWN has become known as a nuanced, groundbreaking picture of the intense controversy and crippling uncertainty surrounding Lyme disease, and the only book of its kind. Award-winning journalist Pamela Weintraub reveals her personal struggle with Lyme after she and her family became serious...