Book picks similar to
Cold Vein by Anne Tonner
eating-disorders
memoir
biography
non-fiction
Fix What You Can: Schizophrenia and a Lawmaker's Fight for Her Son
Mindy Greiling - 2020
At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state’s inadequate mental health system. Fix What You Can is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate. Greiling describes challenges shared by many families, ranging from the practical (medication compliance, housing, employment) to the heartbreaking—suicide attempts, victimization, and illicit drug use. Greiling confronts the reality that some people with serious mental illness may be dangerous and reminds us that medication works—if taken. The book chronicles her efforts to pass legislation to address problems in the mental health system, including obstacles to parental access to information and insufficient funding for care and research. It also recounts Greiling’s painful memories of her grandmother, who was confined in an institution for twenty-three years—recollections that strengthen her determination that Jim’s treatment be more humane. Written with her son’s cooperation, Fix What You Can offers hard-won perspective, practical advice, and useful resources through a brave and personal story that takes the long view of what success means when coping with mental illness.
See Naples and Die
Penelope Green - 2007
She uncovers a chaotic metropolis where crime and poverty blur with abundant natural beauty and where the shadow of Mount Vesuvius is a daily reminder that life must be lived for the moment.She leads us through the alleyways of the labyrinthine old town, along the sweeping Gulf of Naples and into suburbia. join her to feast on sweet sfogliatelle, get to know the generous locals, fiercely loyal to their city, and cruise along the coast on the back of a vespa.And when Penny meets a Bass player in a local band, she thinks she might have found that other reason to stick around.....
Breaking Out Of A Broken System
Seth Bolt - 2014
Find out below how all profits from every purchase of this book saves another person's life.Has your life turned out exactly as planned?When you were younger did you have dreams of being a rockstar?...a fireman?...a doctor?Who did you want to be before the world told you who you should be?When we're born, we enter a world full of systems, most of which are out of our control. There are tons of unwritten rules and social pressures we feel forced to follow. We're pressured to:- study hard and get good grades- get accepted and attend college- graduate and find a secure job- get married and start a familyWe're trained not to stray too far from the path.If we follow this recommended path, why do we still feel that we're missing something? In Breaking Out of a Broken System, Seth & Chandler Bolt give you the tools to re-draw the lines, chart new roads, and expand the borders around your life. Each of the brothers writes a totally different perspective on the 15 most important life lessons taught by their parents. These are things they thought everyone learned growing up, but they realized otherwise after going out into the "real world".As you read, you'll have the option to read two completely different perspectives on each life lesson.You can start with the artistic account written by Seth, bass player for the southern rock band NEEDTOBREATHE.Or...Dive into Chandler's entrepreneurial story told from the perspective of the younger brother.There are two major benefits that will manifest from reading these intriguing tales. First, your life will gain a fresh new outlook on how blazing new trails can be the perfect addition to your own path.And secondly, you'll be saving someone else's life.Each book sold saves a life by providing a life-saving malaria pill (#1book1life). Each year, 1.2 million people die from malaria. This is solely because many villages only receive 3-4 months worth of pills per year to cure the disease.Our mission with the "Breaking Out of a Broken System" book launch is to buy 10,000 life-saving malaria pills by selling 10,000 copies of this book.Buy this book, change your life. Buy this book, save another.Buy the book during launch week to get tons of free stuff & a chance to win the trip of lifetime to Uganda!
A Kentish Lad: The Autobiography of Frank Muir
Frank Muir - 1997
On programmes such as My Word! and My Music his distinctive voice became familiar to millions as he displayed an astonishingly well-stocked mind and a genius for ad libbing and outrageous puns. Later, working at the BBC and then at London Weekend Television, he produced some of the best television comedy of the 1960s and 70s. He has written highly successful books for children, and two bestselling anthologies of humour.Frank Muir recalls, in glorious detail, a happy 1920s childhood in the seaside town of Ramsgate, where he was born in his grandmother's pub in Broadstairs, and in London, where he attended an inexpensive but excellent school of a kind no longer to be found. He remembers his very first joke at the age of six, when he knew that his destiny was to make people laugh. He also knew from an early age that he wanted to write, but it took a childhood illness for him to discover that humour and writing could be combined. The death of his father forced him to leave school at the age of fourteen and work in a factory making carbon paper. Then, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the RAF as an air photographer and his memories of the war years, as might be imagined, are engagingly different from the usual kind. It was during those years, with their rich fund of comic material, that he began his career as scriptwriter and performer. At his demob in 1945 he moved naturally to London and the Windmill Theatre, that remarkable breeding ground of talent where new comedians like Jimmy Edwards and Alfred Marks vied with nude girls for the attention of the audience. In story after story he recalls the lost world of London in the 1940s and early 50s, when the laughter and creative ideas seemed to explode out of post-war shabbiness and austerity. Then came the BBC, the legendary partnership with Denis Norden, and half a century of fulfilling the boyhood ambition of that Kentish lad. 'All I ever wanted to do was to write and amuse people.'
No Turning Back: One Man's Inspiring True Story of Courage, Determination, and Hope
Bryan Anderson - 2011
Wylie the Brave Street Dog Who Never Gave Up
Pen Farthing - 2014
But for Wylie, the gentle, cropped eared ball of fur, miracles seemed to happen quite regularly. Beaten and abused at the hands of uncaring humans, Wylie suffered terrible injuries that needed urgent treatment. Rescued close to death, with hacked off ears and a severed tail, he was attended to by soldiers who feared he would not last the night. Astonishingly he did, only to return days later with new injuries. However a lifeline came when he was handed over to animal welfare Charity Nowzad and flown to Britain in the hope of finding a new life. But would anyone take a chance on a seemingly undomesticated stray? Luckily for Wylie his biggest adventure yet was about to begin...
Unsinkable: My Story
Jane McDonald - 2019
The nation first fell in love with Jane twenty years ago, as the break-out star of BBC reality TV show The Cruise. She was catapulted to dizzying overnight success, but since then, she has navigated some stormy waters. Her dreams hit the rocks as TV and music execs, 'the London lot', swooped in and tried to morph her into a generic international diva. Her fans didn't recognise her, and melted away. Her marriage to Henrik, which began with a fairytale Carribean wedding watched by a television audience of 13.5m, collapsed. Jane lost her confidence, and hid from the world.But Jane's unsinkable and now she's back on the crest of a wave. In her uplifting autobiography she shares her incredible story with heart and humour. It hasn't always been plain sailing, but now she's enjoying more success than she's ever had before, and her fans love her all the more for it.
Hurry Up Nurse!: Memoirs of nurse training in the 1970'
Dawn Brookes - 2016
It follows the experiences of the author as she and her friends come to terms with the non-stop hustle and bustle of hospital life. This book treats the reader to a peep behind the scenes as we enter the hospital wards. As well as an insight into nurse training, hurry up nurse provides a glimpse into the social history of life in the 1970's and early 1980's.
On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist: Expeditions in an in-between world where therapy ends and stories begin
Michael Harding - 2017
All of a sudden, he found himself falling back into the old religious devotions of an earlier time. The meaning he had found through years of engagement with therapy began to dissolve.
Here, in On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist, Harding examines the search for meaning in life which keeps him fastened to the idea of god.
After many therapy sessions focused on an effort to uncover personal truth, and long solitary months on the road with a one man show, Harding is finally led to an artists' retreat in the shadow of Skellig Michael.Mixing stories from the road with dispatches from his Irish Times columns, On Tuesdays I'm a Buddhist is a spell-binding and powerful book about the human condition, the narratives we weave around the self, and the ultimate bliss of living in the present moment.
'What happens between one story and the next? That's the really interesting part. That's the space where we find bliss; where we float sometimes, suspended, and only for a brief moment. Perhaps only for a few scarce moments in an entire life.'
Rolling with the Punchlines: A Memoir
Urzila Carlson - 2020
Urzila talks candidly about her childhood with a great family, apart from her abusive dad, and about growing up in South Africa. She shares crazy but true tales about her OE, her move to New Zealand, coming out, getting married and having children, and her life in comedy. This is a great listen from one of our most loved and most popular comedians.
Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl
Stacy Pershall - 2010
. . ranges from the shocking to the simply lovely." —Marya Hornbacher
Stacy Pershall grew up depressed and too smart for her own good, a deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas (population 1,000), where the prevailing wisdom was that Jesus healed all. From her days as a thirteen-year-old Jesus freak, through a battle with anorexia and bulimia, her first manic episode at eighteen, and the eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited and at times mordantly funny memoir chronicles Pershall's journey through hell-several breakdowns and suicide attempts—and her struggle with the mental health care system. After her 2001 suicide attempt, broadcast live on a Webcam, Pershall realized the need to heal her mind and body. She found a revolutionary cure (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) and a new mood-stabilizing medication. She also met a tattoo artist and discovered the healing power of body modification. By giving over her skin and enduring the physical pain, she learned about the true nature of trust.
Planet of the Umps: A Baseball Life from Behind the Plate
Ken Kaiser - 2003
From the first day he hit a minor league catcher with a pool table to the fateful day baseball called him out on a strike, Kaiser was one of the game's most popular and colorful characters. And in this autobiography-written with the co-author of Ron Luciano's classic bestseller The Umpire Strikes Back - Kaiser brings to life his wild adventures from the pro wrestling arena to the baseball diamond.This is the hysterically true story of four decades of baseball as lived and loved on the playing field, from Ted Williams and Billy Martin to Derek Jeter and Mark McGwire, from one-eyed umpires to space-age technology. And as he did throughout his long and sometimes controversial career, the larger-than-his-chest-protector Kaiser called 'em as he saw 'em.
Biting Anorexia: A Firsthand Account of an Internal War
Lucy Howard-Taylor - 2009
I am in recovery from anorexia nervosa and major depression, each of which almost killed me.So begins Biting Anorexia, an extraordinary account of a teenage girl's descent into the tortured existence of anorexia and her arduous, remarkable recovery. Much of this unflinchingly candid memoir is ripped directly from the pages of author Lucy Howard-Taylor's diary as she struggled with the torturous condition, offering a rare glimpse into the thoughts and fears that grip the minds of those struggling with anorexia, the most fatal of all psychiatric illnesses.Tinged with a wicked sense of humor, Lucy's beautifully written, penetrating insights capture the overpowering anxiety that comes with anorexia and reveal the challenge of recovery. This courageous and compelling story will inspire and support those troubled with the condition, and their family and friends, the world over.… a graphic yet poetic insight into the pain and suffering experienced by sufferers of eating disorders.—Claire Vickery, CEO and founder of The Butterfly Foundation
Just Don't Call Me Ma'am: How I Ditched the South, Forgot My Manners, and Managed to Survive My Twenties with (Most of) My Dignity Still Intact
Anna Mitchael - 2010
In fact, she may even be a lot like you. In her fast-moving world, she might be called on as a friend, coworker, daughter, girlfriend, confidante, brat, cynic, or domestic-goddess-in-training. She's willing to juggle pretty much anything that gets thrown her way, but the one label she simply won't embrace is ma'am.Like so many bright-eyed college graduates before her, Mitchael begins her twenties armed with the conviction that the world is hers for the taking. And she discovers that it is, mostly—only no one told her just how often she’d have to pick herself up off the floor along the way.Written for every woman who’s experienced the ups and downs of trying to figure out who you’re really meant to be, Just Don’t Call Me Ma’am is a story of one woman and the choices that add up to be her twentysomething life—and of how sometimes you have to remember where you came from before you can figure out where you’re going.
Barefoot in the Bindis
Angela Wales - 2019
What he lacked in experience and expertise, he made up for in enthusiasm. Or so he hoped.When the family arrived on a lonely hill in northern New South Wales, they had no electricity, no running water, no telephone and no choice but to make that tangle of bush their home. From Angela Wales, eldest of the five kids, comes this extraordinarily vivid and evocative account of the next ten years as they tried to tame six thousand acres and navigate the challenges of country life.Filled with drama and hilarity, joy and back-breaking toil, Barefoot in the Bindis portrays a childhood spent in the bush, and is a sensational picture of Australia past.