With her confidence shattered, even leaving the house is scary, and a promising romance with gorgeous Logan is over before it even had a chance to begin. But cheered on by her dad and her great friend, Madison, she makes a decision that could change everything. Can Martha find the courage to step out into the world and love again?

    When he tries to protect her will she fall for him or head for danger to spite him?Grady Holman knows the Lanza family murdered his father but the Lanza men are charming, wealthy, and they fund the healthcare for the small town of Emerald Coast. When the Lanzas bring a new pediatrician to town, Grady vows to protect her at all costs. She seems to return his feelings, until he punches Jonathon Lanza without provocation.Can Grady gain her trust and be able to protect her, or will she be the Lanzas’ next victim?

    He wondered at first if some goo or gunk had worked its way into his right eye. But this was no fleeting annoyance, no fixable inconvenience. Overnight, a rare stroke had cut off blood to one of his optic nerves, rendering him functionally blind in that eye—forever. And he soon learned from doctors that the same disorder could ravage his left eye, too. He could lose his sight altogether. In The Beauty of Dusk, Bruni hauntingly recounts his adjustment to this daunting reality, a medical and spiritual odyssey that involved not only reappraising his own priorities but also reaching out to, and gathering wisdom from, longtime friends and new acquaintances who had navigated their own traumas and afflictions. The result is a poignant, probing, and ultimately uplifting examination of the limits that all of us inevitably encounter, the lenses through which we choose to evaluate them and the tools we have for perseverance. Bruni’s world blurred in one sense, as he experienced his first real inklings that the day isn’t forever and that light inexorably fades, but sharpened in another. Confronting unexpected hardship, he felt more blessed than ever before. There was vision lost. There was also vision found.

    Now she’s cashing in her credits at the local fertility clinic so she can do the traveling she’s always dreamed of.But when the clinic offers her a secret third option, she can’t resist.The plan? Act as a surrogate for an alien male, and have her own fertility restored in exchange.The catch? She and the tall, dark and handsome alien will need to do it the old-fashioned way.He’s wealthy. She’s poor. He’s set in his ways. She longs to travel. The only thing the two agree on? They’ve both made a terrible mistake.Their pact is simple - convince the staff of the Midsummer Center that they’re trying their best. They’ll go their separate ways when it’s over.All they have to do is manage not to fall for each other in the most romantic place in the known universe, where the admin, the staff, and the system’s most gifted AI are all working together to make falling in love (or at least in lust) completely irresistible.Author’s Note:This Science Fiction Romance contains fictional alien solutions to infertility and depictions of gestational carrying for aliens that are in no way based on human gestational carrier practices. Resolve, The National Infertility Association, is a non-profit resource for information, advocacy, and support and may be a helpful resource for anyone seeking support in their fertility journey.

    

    Ram doesn’t care the woman he claimed as his old lady is a US Marshal. As an outlaw biker he turns out to be just the man she needs in her life to make sense of the havoc when justice takes a turn and corrupt agents are threatening her life. Fighting the system to get justice is going to take more than the law to uphold. Especially when it starts to rain bullets and the body count flies through the roof. The moment you pull the trigger, there’s no stopping the bullet; all you can do is brace for impact. Collide with the world of Trigger Pull MC, where an encounter with a rugged biker will inevitably change your life.

    She rushes Tophs to the doctor, ignoring the part of herself, trained by years of therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, that tries to whisper that she’s overreacting. But at the hospital, her maternal instincts are confirmed: something is wrong with her boy, and Taylor’s life will never be the same. With every question the doctors answer about Tophs’s increasingly troubling symptoms, more arise, and Taylor dives into the search for a diagnosis. She spends countless hours trying to navigate health and education systems that can be hostile to Black mothers and children; at night she googles, prays, and interrogates her every action. Some days, her sweet, charismatic boy seems just fine—others, he struggles to answer simple questions. What is she missing?When Taylor brings Tophs to a long-awaited appointment with a geneticist, she hopes that this time, she’ll leave with answers. The test reveals nothing about what’s causing Tophs’s drops in blood sugar, his processing delays—but it does reveal something unexpected about Taylor’s own health. What if her son’s challenges have saved her life? And how can she choose the best path forward—for herself and for her beautiful, unsolvable boy? This Boy We Made is a stirring and radiantly written examination of the bond between mother and child, full of hard-won ins

    Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier. Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness, and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions, ones that resist easy description or simple cures. And as America faces this health crisis of extraordinary proportions, the populations most likely to be neglected by our institutions include women, the working class, and people of color. Blending lyricism and erudition, candor and empathy, O’Rourke brings together her deep and disparate talents and roles as critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient, synthesizing the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease. The Invisible Kingdom offers hope for the sick, solace and insight for their loved ones, and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.

    Get ready for all the naughty nurses, dirty doctors, and patient shenanigans that take place in Eastport General.Doctor All-Nighter Burb Coming Soon!

     The United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries—yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world. At the heart of the problem is Big Pharma, which funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, withholds the real data from those trials as corporate secrets, and shapes most of the information relied upon by health care professionals. In this no-holds-barred exposé, Dr. John Abramson—one of the foremost experts on the drug industry’s deceptive tactics—combines patient stories with what he learned during many years of serving as an expert in national drug litigation to reveal the tangled web of financial interests at the heart of the dysfunction in our health-care system. For example, one of pharma’s best-kept secrets is that the peer reviewers charged with ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the clinical trial reports published in medical journals do not even have access to complete data and must rely on manufacturer-influenced summaries. Likewise for the experts who write the clinical practice guidelines that define our standards of care. The result of years of research and privileged access to the inner workings of the U.S. medical-industrial complex, Sickening shines a light on the dark underbelly of American health care—and presents a path toward genuine reform.

    The American Wives Club springs into action with a wild meddling scheme as Scots, Brits, witches, and nudists unite in their common goal.To create a happy ending. But for who?The American Wives Club is a multi-series crossover book featuring characters from three bestselling worlds—Hot Brits, Hot Scots, and the Au Naturel Trilogy. Coming soon in audio narrated by Zachary Webber & Stella Hunter with a special appearance by Shane East.

    Here are gripping accounts of unruly molecules and the diseases that form in their wake.A college student cannot remember if she has eaten breakfast. By dinner, she is strapped to a hospital bed, convinced she is battling zombies. A man planning to propose marriage instead becomes violently enraged, gripped by body spasms so severe that he nearly bites off his own tongue. One after another, poor farmers in South Carolina drop dead from a mysterious epidemic of dementia.With an intoxicating blend of history and intrigue, Sara Manning Peskin invites readers to play medical detective, tracing each diagnosis from the patient to an ailing nervous system. Along the way, Peskin entertains with tales of the sometimes outlandish, often criticized, and forever devoted scientists who discovered it all.Peskin never loses sight of the human impact of these conditions. Alzheimer’s Disease is more than the gradual loss of a loved one; it can be a family’s multigenerational curse. The proteins that abound in every cell of our bodies are not simply strings of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon; they are the building blocks of our personalities and relationships. A Molecule Away from Madness is an unputdownable journey into the deepest mysteries of our brains.

    Mark G. Shrime comes an inspiring memoir about finding the answer to life's biggest question—"Why?"—and about following that answer through remarkable, unlikely places on the road to fulfillment, purpose, and joy.SOLVING FOR WHY chronicles one man's journey to find the answer to the biggest of all life's questions: "Why?" Following a traumatic car accident, Dr. Shrime—the child of Lebanese immigrants fleeing a civil war, who later became a successful practicing surgeon in Boston—found himself compelled to change the course of his life, determined to find meaning and satisfaction even if it meant diverting from America’s idea of “success.” Featuring stories, insights, and research from his own exceptional life and work, SOLVING FOR WHY is the story of Dr. Shrime's search for—and discovery of—lifelong fulfillment.  Now a global surgeon operating on a hospital ship docked off the coast of West Africa and one of the few global experts on surgery in low- and middle-income countries, Dr. Shrime seeks to impart the wisdom of the lessons he’s learned over the course of his search for a life of true contentment. In the tradition of Dr. Paul Farmer's To Repair the World, Dr. Atul Gawande's Better, and Dr. Michele Harper's The Beauty in Breaking, SOLVING FOR WHY combines personal stories with deep, thoughtful research into the challenges of working in modern medicine in the 21st century and the commodification of work in America. A story of discovery and transformation, SOLVING FOR WHY seeks to help readers answer the “why” of their own lives and ultimately find joy outside the status quo.

    

    Anthea Allen’s writing is raw, honest and full of love for those she cares for.’ Susanna ReidAn extraordinarily powerful memoir based on the diaries of intensive care nurse Anthea Allen, who worked on the front line of one of the largest hospitals in Europe – St. George’s in South London – during the peak of the Covid crisis.Her gripping and incredibly moving recollections have been feted by a great range of people, from Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid on Good Morning Britain to Richard Branson and the Queen’s apothecary, as well as being excerpted in the Daily Mail. What started as a weekend email to friends and family to process the reality of life during Covid quickly won her a growing army of support. Anthea has a rare gift of communicating the unique camaraderie of the NHS, the private tragedies of families, and the struggles which she has faced holding her personal and professional life together. Beyond politics, charts and statistics, Anthea – a natural and truly eloquent diarist – tells the stories of real people, real lives and real hopes and fears in an extraordinary time none of us will ever forget.

    Years of painstakingly organized pre-pandemic planning documents led public health experts to initially discourage the use of masks, or even insinuate that they could lead to increased rates of spread.Yet seemingly in a matter of days in spring 2020, leading infectious disease scientists and organizations reversed their previous positions and recommended masking as the key tool to slow the spread of COVID and dramatically reduce infections.Unmasked tells the story of how effective or ineffective masks and mask mandate policies were in impacting the trajectory of the pandemic throughout the world.Author Ian Miller covers the earliest days of the pandemic, from experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci contradicting their previous statements and recommending masks as the most important policy intervention against the spread of COVID, to the months afterward as many locations around the globe mandated masks in nearly all public settings.With easy-to-understand charts and visual aids, along with detailed, clear explanations of the dramatic shift in policy and expectations, Unmasked makes the data-driven case that masks might not have achieved the goals that Fauci and other public health experts created.

    Recovery and convalescence are words that exist at the periphery of our lives - until we are forced to contend with what they really mean.Here, GP and writer Gavin Francis explores how - and why - we get better, revealing the many shapes recovery takes, its shifting history and the frequent failure of our modern lives to make adequate space for it.Characterised by Francis's beautiful prose and his view of medicine as 'the alliance of science and kindness', Recovery is a book about a journey that most of us never intend to make. Along the way, he unfolds a story of hope, transformation, and the everyday miracle of healing.

    Readers will meet Katalin Karikó, who made it possible to use messenger RNA in vaccines but struggled for years just to hang on to her job. There’s also Derrick Rossi, who leveraged Karikó’s work to found Moderna but was eventually expelled from his company. And then there’s Barney Graham at the National Institutes of Health, who had a career-long obsession with solving the riddle of why two toddlers died in a vaccine trial in 1966,  a tragedy that ultimately led to a critical breakthrough in vaccine science. With both foresight and luck, Graham and these other crucial scientists set the course for a coronavirus vaccine years before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. The author draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with key players to tell the definitive story about how the race to create the vaccine sparked a revolution in medical science.

    

    It bears witness to both the confusion and the clarity that accompany great pain, and stands as a testament to empathy, care and humanity when life is at its hardest.'We were looked after by strangers who became family, and he saw more kindness, more love, in twenty-one days than some might see in a lifetime. For his brief moments in this world, he experienced all of the very best things it can offer.'Georgie's spare, intimate and at times surprisingly comic writing offers an extraordinary message of hope. If Not For You is about the redeeming power of love and the light it shines, even in our darkest hour.

    Desmond Tutu, Amitabh Bachchan, and Nelson Mandela survived it, just.  For centuries, tuberculosis has ravaged cities and plagued the human body. In  Phantom Plague, Vidya Krishnan, traces the history of tuberculosis from the slums of 19th-century New York to modern Mumbai. In a narrative spanning century, Krishnan shows how superstition and folk-remedies, made way for scientific understanding of TB, such that it was controlled and cured in the West. The cure was never available to black and brown nations. And the tuberculosis bacillus showed a remarkable ability to adapt – so that at the very moment it could have been extinguished as a threat to humanity, it found a way back, aided by authoritarian government, toxic kindness of philanthropists, science denialism and medical apartheid.Krishnan’s original reporting paints a granular portrait of the post-antibiotic era as a new, aggressive, drug resistant strain of TB takes over. Phantom Plague is an urgent, riveting and fascinating narrative that deftly exposes the weakest links in our battle against this ancient foe.

    Fast and without warning.On return from near-death, Tanya Shadrick vows to stop sleepwalking through life. To take more risks, like the characters in the fairy tales she loved as a small girl, before loss and fear had her retreat into routine and daydreams.Around the care of young children, she starts to play with the shape and scale of her days: to stray from the path, get lost in the woods, make bargains with strangers.As she moves beyond her respectable roles as worker, wife and mother in a small town, Tanya learns what it takes - and costs - to break the spell of longing for love, approval, safety, rescue.

    

    Then, she heard that their mother was in the Emergency Room with a heart problem.The doctor tending to her mother was Dr. Joe Adams, who was far from Diane’s idea of the family doctor. He had been alone since his first wife had died, and was apparently heaven-sent as a mate for Diane, if she could only get past the trauma of her previous near-miss at the altar.The heart problem was hard to solve initially, the subsequent difficulty turned out to be murder, and affected the lives of both Diane and Joe.Dr. Richard Mabry is a retired physician, now writing “medical mysteries with heart.” In addition to his medical books, he is the author of one non-fiction book, several novellas, and thirteen published novels. His novels have been finalists for the Carol Award, the Inspirational Reader’s Choice Award, the Reviewer’s Choice Award, the Selah Award, and others.He and his wife live in north Texas. In addition to regular efforts (thus far unsuccessful) to improve his golf game, he spends much of his time trying to convince his family that sitting at his desk staring into space does indeed represent work.

    But the story of this pandemic extends far further back than many realize. In this fascinating narrative, epidemiologist Dan Werb traces the rise of the coronavirus family and society's desperate attempt to counter its threat. In the process, he weaves another kind of family history: that of a group of scientists who foresaw the danger and spent decades working to stop a looming pandemic.When virologist Ralph Baric began researching coronaviruses in the 1980s, the field was a scientific backwater--the few variants known to infect humans caused little more than the common cold. But when a novel coronavirus sparked the 2003 SARS epidemic, this obscure viral family became the single greatest pandemic threat our species faced. For all its novelty, the SARS epidemic shared alarming similarities with historical moments when coronaviruses made rare but deadly jumps from animals to human hosts. When the MERS virus emerged ten years later--the blink of an eye in virological time--Baric and his allies realized that time was running out before a pandemic strain would make the inevitable jump.In The Invisible Siege, Werb unpacks the dynamic history and microscopic complexity of an organism that has wreaked cycles of havoc upon the world for millennia. Elegantly tracing decades of scientific investigation, Werb illuminates how Baric's team of scientists hatched an audacious plan not merely to battle COVID-19, but to end pandemics forever. Yet as they raced to develop vaccines and therapeutics that struck at coronaviruses' key biological mechanisms, they ran headlong into a complicated nexus of science, ethics, industry, and politics that threatened to derail their efforts just as COVID-19 loomed ever larger.The Invisible Siege is at once the story of an unprecedented global scientific movement to stop COVID-19--a rare success story in a pandemic defined by system failure--and the infuriating factors that even now threaten to leave essential scientific discovery unfinished and the world vulnerable to the ravages of the inevitable coronaviruses to come.

    Processing all that pain so you can live a full life after is something entirely different. In the shadows of emotional pain, survival can take priority over healing. Lasting reverberations of traumatic experiences can cripple decision-making skills, creep into relationships, and leave scars on the people you love. Peace and empowerment after trauma are possible—when you embrace your pain as part of your story.After her trauma, Poonam Bhuchar reemerged as a healed survivor and reclaimed her power. Part memoir, part self-help revelation, SAFE from the Pain pairs Bhuchar’s inspiring story with the transformational secret of the SAFE Method to guide you through the darkness of your pain and into the light of a prosperous, happy life.You’ll learn:• Four steps of the SAFE Method to stop ignoring pain, work through emotions, and regain control.• The impacts of stress from emotional pain on every aspect of life, including your family, body, and self-worth. • How to overcome your victim mindset and accept responsibility—because ownership leads to action. • Three types of forgiveness for freedom from society’s expectations, cultural beliefs, and your own judgments.• Why embracing your journey is essential to happiness, a bigger life purpose, and alignment with your true self. You can’t move forward if you live in the past. Get SAFE from the Pain to transcend the darkness of pain and illuminate your way to the beautiful life waiting on the other side.

    

    Along with this technological breakthrough there has emerged a movement to use this information to help prospective parents “eliminate preventable genetic disease.” As the prospect of systematically excluding the appearance of unwanted mutations in our children comes within reach, David B. Goldstein examines the possible consequences from these types of choices. Engaging and accessible, this clarion call for responsible and informed stewardship of the human genome provides an overview of what we do and do not know about human genetics and looks at some of the complex, yet largely unexplored, issues we must be most careful about as we move into an era of increasing numbers of parents exercising direct control over the genomes of their children.

    A thousand dollars for a broken leg, a few hundred for a nasty cut while cooking dinner. Then there are the greater costs for even greater misfortunes. The car accidents, breast cancers, blood diseases, and dark depressions.When Emily Maloney was nineteen she tried to kill herself. An act that would not only cost a great deal personally, but also financially, sending her down a dark spiral of misdiagnoses, years spent in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices, and tens of thousands owed in medical debt. To work to pay off this crippling burden, Emily becomes an emergency room technician. Doing the grunt work in a hospital, and taking care of patients at their most vulnerable moments, chronicling these interactions in searingly beautiful, surprising ways.Shocking and often slyly humorous, Cost of Living is a brilliant examination of just what exactly our troubled healthcare system asks us to pay, as well as a look at what goes on behind the scenes at our hospitals and in the minds of caregivers.

    Throughout his long career, he performed more than 10,000 autopsies and gave expert scientific evidence in court that helped secure approximately 400 criminal convictions.But, remarkably, Manock, a self-described ‘witness of fact’, did not have the necessary training for such a senior, specialist role, and he made serious errors in several major cases — with tragic consequences, including the apparently wrongful imprisonment of innocent people. The full extent of his wrongdoing and the exact number of cases impacted by it remains a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired, due to the continuing refusal of those in power to heed calls to launch a formal inquiry into his career.In this book, Rooke examines several of Manock’s most controversial cases, and speaks with many of his former colleagues, people directly impacted by his flawed work, and legal experts. At its heart, A Witness of Fact is about how an entire legal system has failed badly, how unsafe verdicts have been swept under the carpet — and how forensic evidence that is admitted in courts of law in Australia and across the world is dubious more often than we would like to think.

    Robinson shares surprising stories of illness and medicine that do not sacrifice hard truth for easy dramatics. These true stories are filled with details of difficult days and nights in the world of high-tech medical care, and they show the ongoing struggle in making critical decisions with no good answer. This collection presents the raw moments where his expertise in medical ethics and pediatrics are put to the test. He is neither saint, nor hero, nor wizard. Robinson admits that on his best days he was merely ordinary. Yet in writing down the authentic stories of his patients, Robinson discovers what led him to the practice of medicine—and how his idealism was no match for the realities he faced in modern health care.

    From day one, you’re programmed with beliefs from family, friends, and society. These functional codes propel you forward, but broken codes could limit your career, damage your relationships, and harm your well-being.But codes can be rewritten!Achieve a more fulfilling life with Cracking the Life Code! Babs Faseesin provides the blueprint to discover your ultimate purpose and gain complete mastery of the most important facets of your soul. Your own personal life coach, this guide will help you recode your programming and enhance your possibilities for success, happiness, and abundance.You’ll discover• An empowering process to recognize and change your bad codes into new positive habits.• Four pillars of success that sustain and support your purpose: passion, platform, place, and people.• The Wheel of Life, a self-assessment to quantify the satisfaction, contribution, and growth potential of six key areas.• Case studies highlighting the power of life codes in action to inspire you on your own journey.• Actionable strategies to improve goal achievement in your business, health, spiritual practice, and more. Transform your broken codes into a new compass for success! Get Cracking the Life Code touncover your amazing potential and start a life-changing transformation toward a better future—by rewriting your codes.