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"The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are"-- Provided by publisher. In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals...

Follows a family's long struggle with their son's mysterious medical disorder that from the age of five induced violent physical tics and prompted traumatic treatments, a situation that also pitted the family against a disheartening medical establishment.

In this brave and deeply personal memoir, one of America's most beloved journalists, mother, andNew York Times bestselling author speaks candidly about her battle against breast cancer, her quest to learn about it and teach others, and the transformative effect it's had on her life. When former Good Morning America host Joan Lunden was diagnosed with breast cancer, she set out to learn everything about it to help her survive. With seven children counting...

Jenna is given another shot at life when she receives a donor heart from a girl called Callie. Eternally grateful to Callie and her family, Jenna gets closer to them, but she soon discovers that Callie's perfect family is hiding some very dark secrets....

They called it "minor surgery," but Nancy Greenly, Sean Berman and a dozen others -- all admitted to Boston Memorial Hospital for routine procedures -- were victims of the same inexplicable, hideous tragedy on the operating table. They never woke up. Susan Wheeler is a third-year medical student working as a trainee at Boston Memorial Hospital. Two patients during her residency mysteriously go into comas immediately after their operations due to complications...

At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody, messy, rambunctious, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital--or ice pick--lobotomy. Abandoned by his family within a year of the surgery, Howard spent his teen years in mental institutions, his twenties in jail, and his thirties in...

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery...

Dolores Mendoza is not thriving. She was recently diagnosed with a chronic bladder condition called interstitial cystitis. The painful disease isn’t life threatening, but it is threatening to ruin her life. Just when things seem hopeless, Dolores meets someone poised to change her fate. Terpsichore Berkenbosch-Jones is glamorous, autistic, and homeschooled against her will by her overprotective mother. After a rocky start, the girls form a tentative...

"From the bestselling neurosurgeon and author of Do No Harm, comes Henry Marsh's And Finally, an unflinching and deeply personal exploration of death, life and neuroscience. As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating...

Memoir of John Robison, whose odd behavior was explained when he was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome when he was forty, and the change that made in his life. "Ever since he was young, John Robison longed to connect with other people, but by the time he was a teenager, his odd habits--an inclination to blurt out non-sequiturs, avoid eye contact, dismantle radios, and dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother, Augusten...