Akeret got in his van and set off to visit his most memorable former patients--a journey "in search of story endings." And what remarkable stories they are...Naomi, an abused young Jewish girl from the Bronx who transforms herself into a Spanish flamenco dancer named Isabella--what is she like now, in her mid-fifties?What about Charles, who fell madly in love with a circus polar bear? Had he been able to resist his fatal psychosexual attraction?What of Sasha, the dashing, prize-winning French novelist with writers block and a penchant for exploiting women? In the end, did his art prevail or his life?And what became of Mary--did she ever "murder" again?Like a brilliant psychological detective novel, this book tells its stories in fascinating detail while raising fundamental questions about psychotherapy.

    . . or watches him punch and kick her mother to within an inch of her life. How could this be? Her older sisters teach her how to survive, even when he comes for her in the night.A girl learns to become invisible, to look the other way, to say nothing when a curious stranger asks if she's okay. To lie. To expect nothing, not even from relatives.To cry without tears.To pray silently.When she is fourteen, and weary, a girl begins to wish she were dead. Cruel Harvest is the compelling story of how she lived instead.

    It is also the introduction of a bold and talented literary voice. Before considering reading this book, please see the BookBrowse note on the book jacket/review page.BookBrowse Note: January 9th 2006: An article in the Smoking Gun claimed that James Frey (author of A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard) fabricated key parts of his books. They cited police records, court documents and interviews with law enforcement agents which belie a number of Frey's claims regarding criminal charges against him, jail terms and his fugitive status.In an interview with the Smoking Gun, Frey admitted that he had 'embellished central details' in A Million Little Pieces and backtracked on claims he made in the book.January 26th 2006. Frey's publisher stated that while it initially stood by him, after further questioning of the author, the house has "sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished." It will be adding a a publisher's note and author's note to all future editions of A Million Little Pieces.

    Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of classmates, a passionate lover of a schoolmistress, she's suddenly reclassified as male. Alone & desolate, he commits suicide, aged 30, in a miserable Paris attic. Here's a lost voice of the sexual past in an erotic diary. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our notions of sexuality. Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine's body before & after death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person & the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine & feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality. "Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic...Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts & reviving destinies outside the ordinary."--Le Monde, 7/1978

    The Hollywood image of Dean Martin with a martini in one hand and a woman in the other continues to dominate public perception. Now, Dean's son Ricci reveals the husband and father few people knew, a man who hated parties, adored his mother-in-law, and found utter contentment in a slice of buttered bread. In That's Amore: A Son Remembers Dean Martin, Ricci Martin takes readers on a tour through his childhood, from the star-studded parties to the exploration of "three marriages, eight kids, one family," to the treasured one-on-one time he shared with his father. He also discusses Dean's first meeting with Jerry Lewis and divulges his father's version of the Martin and Lewis breakup. Ricci Martin addresses the key relationships in his father's life, allowing readers to view the Rat Pack years, "The Dean Martin Show," and Dean's divorce from Jeanne through a son's eyes. That's Amore reveals the triumphs, tragedies, and escapades that colored Ricci's childhood, including his brother Dean Paul's death. More than 100 photos from the private Martin family album enhance Ricci Martin's portrait of his father, creating a complete, honest picture of the Rat Pack legend.

    My throat tightens in fear…’At the tender age of five, Madeleine was living a daily nightmare. In a dark, grey building on Jersey, she was just another orphan, defenceless and alone. She was also an easy target. Unbeknownst to the outside world, the care home manager was abusing her, using her like she was his toy. “Say nothing, no one will believe a nasty little kid like you,” he’d whisper. Terrified, Madeleine would keep quiet. And, worse still, the home was selling the children to men who would inflict on them the worst possible abuse. No one cared.This is Madeleine’s heart-breaking story and her fight to survive.

    Part social history, part detective story, part exposé, The Baby Thief is a riveting investigative narrative that explores themes that continue to reverberate today.

    I did not write this book for sympathy or notoriety; I wrote it in an attempt to shed light on the ghosts that have haunted me for a lifetime, hoping that by putting them down on paper that I could look at them more objectively from a mature point of view and eventually free myself from them.

    It begins with Sally’s visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city’s most sweltering months. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her–her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg’s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.

    "Sound advice for any entrepreneur or business manager".--Chicago Tribune.

    Both sought to redefine themselves beneath the stars. By the time they made it to the snowy Cascade Range of British Columbia—the trail’s end—Aspen and Justin were in love.Embarking on a new pilgrimage the next summer, they returned to those same mossy mountains where they’d met, and they married. They built a world together, three years of a happy marriage. Until a cold November morning, when, after kissing Aspen goodbye, Justin left to attend the funeral of a close friend.He never came back. As days became weeks, her husband’s inexplicable absence left Aspen unmoored. Shock, grief, fear, and anger battled for control—but nothing prepared her for the disarming truth. A revelation that would lead Aspen to reassess not only her own life but that of the disappeared as well.The result is a brave and inspiring memoir of secrets kept and unearthed, of a vanishing that became a gift: a woman’s empowering reclamation of unmitigated purpose in the surreal wake of mystifying loss.

    He led the University of Georgia to victory in the Sugar Bowl on the way to an NCAA Championship and he capped a sensati

    When Conover’s request to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer Academy was denied, he decided to apply for a job as a prison officer. So begins his odyssey at Sing Sing, once a model prison but now the state’s most troubled maximum-security facility. The result of his year there is this remarkable look at one of America’s most dangerous prisons, where drugs, gang wars, and sex are rampant, and where the line between violator and violated is often unclear.

    In All Souls, MacDonald takes us deep into the secret heart of Southie. With radiant insight, he opens up a contradictory world, where residents are besieged by gangs and crime but refuse to admit any problems, remaining fiercely loyal to their community. MacDonald also introduces us to the unforgettable people who inhabit this proud neighborhood. We meet his mother, Ma MacDonald, an accordion-playing, spiked-heel-wearing, indomitable mother to all; Whitey Bulger, the lord of Southie, gangster and father figure, protector and punisher; and Michael's beloved siblings, nearly half of whom were lost forever to drugs, murder, or suicide.MacDonald’s story is ultimately one of overcoming the racist, classist ideology he was born into. It's also a searing portrayal of life in a poor, white neighborhood plagued by violence and crime and deeply in denial about it.

    We lose love, lose jobs, lose our sense of self. For Nora McInerny, it was losing her husband, her father, and her unborn second child in one catastrophic year.But in the wake of loss, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind. Some circles call finding happiness after loss “Chapter 2”—the continuation of something else. Today, Nora is remarried and mothers four children aged 16 months to 16 years. While her new circumstances bring her extraordinary joy, they are also tinged with sadness over the loved ones she’s lost.Life has made Nora a reluctant expert in hard conversations. On her wildly popular podcast, she talks about painful experiences we inevitably face, and exposes the absurdity of the question “how are you?” that people often ask when we’re coping with the aftermath of emotional catastrophe. She knows intimately that when your life falls apart, there’s a mad rush to be okay—to find a silver lining, to get to the happy ending. In this, her second memoir, Nora offers a tragicomic exploration of the tension between finding happiness and holding space for the unhappy experiences that have shaped us.No Happy Endings is a book for people living life after life has fallen apart. It’s a book for people who know that they’re moving forward, not moving on. It’s a book for people who know life isn’t always happy, but it isn’t the end: there will be unimaginable joy and incomprehensible tragedy. As Nora reminds us, there will be no happy endings—but there will be new beginnings.