The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder


Charles Graeber - 2013
    But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, husband, beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as many as 300 patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history.Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When, in March of 2006, Charles Cullen was marched from his final sentencing in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into a waiting police van, it seemed certain that the chilling secrets of his life, career, and capture would disappear with him. Now, in a riveting piece of investigative journalism nearly ten years in the making, journalist Charles Graeber presents the whole story for the first time. Based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, interviews, wire-tap recordings and videotapes, as well as exclusive jailhouse conversations with Cullen himself and the confidential informant who helped bring him down, THE GOOD NURSE weaves an urgent, terrifying tale of murder, friendship, and betrayal.Graeber's portrait of Cullen depicts a surprisingly intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsion to kill, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life hidden even to his family and friends. Were it not for the hardboiled, unrelenting work of two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put together the pieces of Cullen's professional past, and a fellow nurse willing to put everything at risk, including her job and the safety of her children, there's no telling how many more lives could have been lost.In the tradition of In Cold Blood, THE GOOD NURSE does more than chronicle Cullen's deadly career and the breathless efforts to stop him; it paints an incredibly vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating look inside America's medical system. Harrowing and irresistibly paced, this book will make you look at medicine, hospitals, and the people who work in them, in an entirely different way.

The Dark Side Part 2 - Real Life Accounts of an NHS Paramedic - The Traumatic, the Tragic and the Tearful


Andy Thompson - 2014
    In the style of his first book, Andy recalls each event from the detailed documentation recorded at the time, each account written in a way that puts the reader right there next to him so that you live the events in real-time, hear the dialogue between paramedics, patient, their loved ones and other healthcare professionals as it would have been, and share in Andy’s thought processes during each of the ten very different situations he encounters.The term ‘The Dark Side’ describes the frontline emergency aspect of the Ambulance Service, since paramedics frequently experience sombre situations. In ‘The Dark Side, Part 2’ you will share in some truly traumatic, tragic and tearful events involving a seemingly vibrant, healthy young patient, a prison inmate, the victims of an horrific car crash, heart attacks, a frightening epileptic fit, the alarming effects of an allergic reaction, and what can happen when under-strain doctors prescribe the wrong medication. But there’s still room for lighthearted moments and a taste of the sometimes dark humour that allows paramedics to continually deal with events most of us would find too horrific. The detail in the descriptions of the care given to each patient on-scene by Andy and his colleagues will have you marvelling at the ability of these healthcare professionals to work at such speed of thought, buying enough time to deliver a patient into the specialist hands of hospital care and often full recovery. Of course there are inevitably also those times when tears of hope turn to tears of despair for loved ones. You cannot feel that pain until it happens to you, but this book will bring you mighty close to it at times.

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live


Nicholas A. Christakis - 2020
    Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague—an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species.Unleashing new divisions in our society as well as opportunities for cooperation, this 21st-century pandemic has upended our lives in ways that will test, but not vanquish, our already frayed collective culture. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo's Arrow envisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature.

Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking


Tim Dean - 2009
    Purposely flying in the face of decades of safe-sex campaigning and HIV/AIDS awareness initiatives, barebacking is unquestionably radical behavior, behavior that most people would rather condemn than understand. Thus the time is ripe for Unlimited Intimacy, Tim Dean’s riveting investigation into barebacking and the distinctive subculture that has grown around it.Audacious and undeniably provocative, Dean’s profoundly reflective account is neither a manifesto nor an apology; instead, it is a searching analysis that tests the very limits of the study of sex in the twenty-first century. Dean’s extensive research into the subculture provides a tour of the scene’s bars, sex clubs, and Web sites; offers an explicit but sophisticated analysis of its pornography; and documents his own personal experiences in the culture. But ultimately, it is HIV that animates the controversy around barebacking, and Unlimited Intimacy explores how barebackers think about transmitting the virus—especially the idea that deliberately sharing it establishes a new network of kinship among the infected. According to Dean, intimacy makes us vulnerable, exposes us to emotional risk, and forces us to drop our psychological barriers. As a committed experiment in intimacy without limits—one that makes those metaphors of intimacy quite literal—barebacking thus says a great deal about how intimacy works.Written with a fierce intelligence and uncompromising nerve, Unlimited Intimacy will prove to be a milestone in our understanding of sexual behavior.

When We Rise: My Life in the Movement


Cleve Jones - 2016
    There were. Like thousands of other young people, Jones, nearly penniless, was drawn in the early 1970s to San Francisco, a city electrified by progressive politics and sexual freedom.Jones found community--in the hotel rooms and ramshackle apartments shared by other young adventurers, in the city's bathhouses and gay bars like The Stud, and in the burgeoning gay district, the Castro, where a New York transplant named Harvey Milk set up a camera shop, began shouting through his bullhorn, and soon became the nation's most outspoken gay elected official. With Milk's encouragement, Jones dove into politics and found his calling in "the movement." When Milk was killed by an assassin's bullet in 1978, Jones took up his mentor's progressive mantle--only to see the arrival of AIDS transform his life once again.By turns tender and uproarious--and written entirely in his own words--When We Rise is Jones' account of his remarkable life. He chronicles the heartbreak of losing countless friends to AIDS, which very nearly killed him, too; his co-founding of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation during the terrifying early years of the epidemic; his conception of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest community art project in history; the bewitching story of 1970s San Francisco and the magnetic spell it cast for thousands of young gay people and other misfits; and the harrowing, sexy, and sometimes hilarious stories of Cleve's passionate relationships with friends and lovers during an era defined by both unprecedented freedom and possibility, and prejudice and violence alike.When We Rise is not only the story of a hero to the LQBTQ community, but the vibrantly voice memoir of a full and transformative American life--an activist whose work continues today.

Jeremy Thorpe (Abacus Books)


Michael Bloch - 2014
    When he became leader of the Liberal Party in 1967 at the age of just thirty-seven, he seemed destined for truly great things. But as his star steadily rose so his nemesis drew ever nearer: a time-bomb in the form of Norman Scott, a homosexual wastrel and sometime male model with whom Jeremy had formed an ill-advised relationship in the early 1960s. Scott's incessant boasts about their 'affair' became increasingly embarrassing, and eventually led to a bizarre murder plot to shut him up for good. Jeremy was acquitted of involvement but his career was in ruins.Michael Bloch's magisterial biography is not just a brilliant retelling of this amazing story; ten years in the making, it is also the definitive character study of one of the most fascinating figures in post-war British politics.

How We Live Now: Scenes from the Pandemic


Bill Hayes - 2020
    A neighborhood restaurant turned to-go place where one has a shared drink-on either end of a bar-with the owner. These scenes, among many others, became the new normal as soon as the world began to face the COVID-19 pandemic.In How We Live Now, author and photographer Bill Hayes, with his signature insight and grace, captures these moments of life in real time-as things unfold day-by-day, hour-by-hour, in this strange new world we're now in (for who knows how long?), with its new sets of rules and guidelines, its suddenly deserted streets, shuttered restaurants, bars, shops, and stores. As he wanders the increasingly empty streets of Manhattan, Hayes meets fellow New Yorkers and discovers stories to tell, but he also shares the unexpected moments of grace and gratitude he finds from within his apartment, where he lives alone and-like everyone else-is staying home, trying to keep busy and not bored as he adjusts to enforced solitude with reading, cooking, reconnecting with loved ones, reflecting on the past-and writing. Featuring Hayes's inimitable street photographs, How We Live Now chronicles an unimaginable moment in time, offering a long-lasting reminder that what will gets us through this unprecedented, deadly crisis is each other.

Midwife For Souls


Kathy Kalina - 2007
    Caregivers, friends, and family members are provided with valuable insights into the power of the Catholic faith and prayer in ministering to a dying person. Poetic, practical, and credible, this book is an invaluable guide for anyone who accompanies others during their final pilgrimage here on earth--and helps in their birthing to eternal life.

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche


Ethan Watters - 2009
    But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? In "Crazy Like Us," Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world. The blowback from these efforts is just now coming to light: It turns out that we have not only been changing the way the world talks about and treats mental illness -- we have been changing the mental illnesses themselves.For millennia, local beliefs in different cultures have shaped the experience of mental illness into endless varieties." Crazy Like Us" documents how American interventions have discounted and worked to change those indigenous beliefs, often at a dizzying rate. Over the last decades, mental illnesses popularized in America have been spreading across the globe with the speed of contagious diseases. Watters travels from China to Tanzania to bring home the unsettling conclusion that the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.In post-tsunami Sri Lanka, Watters reports on the Western trauma counselors who, in their rush to help, inadvertently trampled local expressions of grief, suffering, and healing. In Hong Kong, he retraces the last steps of the teenager whose death sparked an epidemic of the American version of anorexia nervosa. Watters reveals the truth about a multi-million-dollar campaign by one of the world's biggest drug companies to change the Japanese experience of depression -- literally marketing the disease along with the drug.But this book is not just about the damage we've caused in faraway places. Looking at our impact on the psyches of people in other cultures is a gut check, a way of forcing ourselves to take a fresh look at our own beliefs about mental health and healing. When we examine our assumptions from a farther shore, we begin to understand how our own culture constantly shapes and sometimes creates the mental illnesses of our time. By setting aside our role as the world's therapist, we may come to accept that we have as much to learn from other cultures' beliefs about the mind as we have to teach.

The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire


Rafael Campo - 1997
    This work aims to bridge the clinical distance of medicine to face the pain of mortality, the brokenness of society and the vulnerability of human beings.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism


Anne Case - 2020
    In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year--and they're still rising. Anne Case and Angus Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. They demonstrate why, for those who used to prosper in America, capitalism is no longer delivering.Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline. For the white working class, today's America has become a land of broken families and few prospects. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. In this critically important book, Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and, above all, to a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. Capitalism, which over two centuries lifted countless people out of poverty, is now destroying the lives of blue-collar America.This book charts a way forward, providing solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.

Let the Faggots Burn: The UpStairs Lounge Fire


Johnny Townsend - 2011
    In the terrible inferno that followed, thirty-two people lost their lives, including a third of the local congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church, their pastor burning to death halfway out a second-story window as he tried to claw his way to freedom. A mother who'd gone to the bar with her two gay sons died alongside them. A man who'd helped his friend escape first was found dead near the fire escape. Two children waited outside of a movie theater across town for a father and step-father who would never pick them up. During this era of rampant homophobia, several families refused to claim the bodies, and many churches refused to bury the dead. Author Johnny Townsend pored through old records and tracked down survivors of the fire and relatives and friends of those killed to compile this fascinating account of a forgotten moment in gay history.

A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death


B.J. Miller - 2019
    “There is nothing wrong with you for dying,” hospice physician B.J. Miller and journalist and caregiver Shoshana Berger write in A Beginner’s Guide to the End. “Our ultimate purpose here isn’t so much to help you die as it is to free up as much life as possible until you do.” Theirs is a clear-eyed and big-hearted action plan for approaching the end of life, written to help readers feel more in control of an experience that so often seems anything but controllable. Their book offers everything from step-by-step instructions for how to do your paperwork and navigate the healthcare system to answers to questions you might be afraid to ask your doctor, like whether or not sex is still okay when you’re sick. Get advice for how to break the news to your employer, whether to share old secrets with your family, how to face friends who might not be as empathetic as you’d hoped, and how to talk to your children about your will. (Don’t worry: if anyone gets snippy, it’ll likely be their spouses, not them.) There are also lessons for survivors, like how to shut down a loved one’s social media accounts, clean out the house, and write a great eulogy. An honest, surprising, and detail-oriented guide to the most universal of all experiences, A Beginner’s Guide to the End is “a book that every family should have, the equivalent of Dr. Spock but for this other phase of life” (New York Times bestselling author Dr. Abraham Verghese).

The E-Myth Physician: Why Most Medical Practices Don't Work and What to Do About It


Michael E. Gerber - 2003
    Gerber, bestselling author of The E-Myth Revisited shares his powerful insights to lead independent physicians to successful practices and enriched lives.Michael Gerber has dedicated much of his professional life to the study of entrepreneurship and business dynamics. His E-Myth Academy is renown in the entrepreneurial world for its business insight and guidance as well as its inspirational advice.In the E-Myth Physician, bestselling author Gerber returns to his roots in order to provide indispensable advice to doctors who own and run their own practices. Gerber provides excellent business insights into topics such as streamlining systems, effective small-business management practices, healthy patient relations and managing cash flow, all with the goal of freeing physicians from the daily grind of running a business and leading them to a happier and more productive life while doing the job they love - practising medicine.

Essentials of the U.S. Health Care System


Leiyu Shi - 2004
    Health System, This Condensed Distillation Of The Important Topics Covered In Delivering Health Care In America Is The Perfect Resource For Courses In Health Policy, Allied Health, Health Administration And More. It Clarifies The Complexities Of Health Care Organization And Finance And Presents A Solid Overview Of How The Various Components Fit Together. The Second Edition Of Essentials Of The US Health Care System Has Been Updated To Include New Data, Charts, Tables And Accompanying Information Throughout The Book. Use As A Stand-Alone Text, Or A Supplement In Various Courses. New Content Includes: Medicare, Medicaid And SCHIP. Ongoing Evolution In U.S. Health Care As A Result Of Corporatization And Globalization. The Role Of Hospitalists. Updated Content On Parts C And D Of Medicare. Including Information On High-Deductible Health Plans/Health Savings Accounts As An Insurance Option. Updated Content On Primary Care And Community Oriented Health Care Development Current Development On Hospital Extensions To The Community. Current Development On Nano Technology. Current Health Policy Issues. Current Discussion On Healthcare Reforms, Including Future Challenges Posed By The Increased Need For Long-Term Care. New Third Edition Now Available!