The Gods of Eden


William Bramley - 1989
    Yet, inexplicably, in the light of astonishing intellectual and technological advancement, Man's progress has been halted in one crucial area; he still indulges the primitive beast within and makes war upon his neighbors.As a result of seven years of intense research, William Bramley has uncovered the sinister thread that links humanity's darkest events -- from the wars of the ancient pharaohs to the assassination of JFK. In this remarkable, shocking and absolutely compelling work, Bramley presents disturbing evidence of an alien presence on Earth -- extraterrestrial visitors who have conspired to dominate Humankind through violence and chaos since the beginning of time...a conspiracy which continues to this very day.

Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America's Border


Jan Brewer - 2011
    Unfairly tarred by liberal critics as a state comprised of racist rednecks, Arizona is on the front lines in the battle against illegal immigration—and the courageous stand of its leader, a national hero who’s been called so tough that she “eats scorpions for breakfast,” will educate and inspire Americans from coast to coast.

Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape


Jenna Miscavige Hill - 2013
    As niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this controversial organization. At 21, she made a break, risking everything she'd ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, her escape, going deep inside a religion that, for decades, has been the subject of fierce debate and speculation worldwide.Piercing the veil of secrecy that has shrouded the world of Scientology, this insider reveals unprecedented firsthand knowledge of the religion, its rituals and its mysterious leader—David Miscavige. From her prolonged separation from her parents as a small child to being indoctrinated to serve the Church, from her lack of personal freedoms to the organization's emphasis on celebrity recruitment, Jenna goes behind the scenes of Scientology's oppressive and alienating culture, detailing an environment rooted in control in which the most devoted followers often face the harshest punishments when out of line. Detailing some of the Church's notorious practices, she also describes a childhood of isolation and neglect—a childhood that, painful as it was, prepared her for a tough life in the Church's most devoted order, the Sea Org. Despite this hardship, it's only when her family approaches dissolution and her world begins to unravel that she's finally able to see the patterns of stifling conformity and psychological control that have ruled her life. Faced with a heartbreaking choice, she mounts a courageous escape, but not before being put thru the ultimate test of family, faith and love. Captivating and disturbing, Beyond Belief is an exploration of the limits of religion and the lengths to which some went to break free.

Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story


Mac McClelland - 2015
    I dissociated... Changes in self-perception and hallucinations-those are some of my other symptoms. You are poison, I chanted silently to myself. And your poison is contagious."So begins Mac McClelland's powerful, unforgettable memoir, Irritable Hearts.When thirty-year-old, award-winning human rights journalist Mac McClelland left Haiti after reporting on the devastating earthquake of 2010, she never imagined how the assignment would irrevocably affect her own life. Back home in California, McClelland cannot stop reliving vivid scenes of violence. She is plagued by waking terrors, violent fantasies, and crippling emotional breakdowns. She can't sleep or stop crying. Her life in shambles, it becomes clear that she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her bewilderment about this sudden loss of control is magnified by the intensity of her feelings for Nico, a French soldier she met in Port-au-Prince and with whom she connected instantly and deeply.With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. She begins to probe the depths of her illness, exploring our culture's history with PTSD, delving into the latest research by the country's top scientists and therapists, and spending time with veterans and their families. McClelland discovers she is far from alone: while we frequently associate PTSD with wartime combat, it is more often caused by other manner of trauma and can even be contagious-close proximity to those afflicted can trigger its symptoms. As she confronts the realities of her diagnosis, she opens up to the love that seems to have found her at an inopportune moment.Irritable Hearts is a searing, personal medical mystery that unfolds at a breakneck pace. But it is also a romance. McClelland fights desperately to repair her heart so that she can give it to the kind, patient, and compassionate man with whom she wants to share a life. Vivid, suspenseful, tender, and intimate, Irritable Hearts is a remarkable exploration of vulnerability and resilience, control and acceptance. It is a riveting and hopeful story of survival, strength, and love.

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness


S. Nassir Ghaemi - 2011
    By combining analysis of the historical evidence with the latest psychiatric research, Ghaemi demonstrates how he thinks these qualities have produced brilliant leadership under the toughest circumstances.individuals and society at large-however high the price for those who endure these illnesses.

Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl


Michele Zackheim - 1990
    In 1903 she vanished. The discovery in 1986 of early love letters between Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric, the woman who would become his first wife, revealed the birth of the child named Lieserl. But after a 1903 letter, there is no more mention of her. With nearly nine decades between the birth and our knowledge of the birth, and with scant clues as to the course of her life, the fate of Lieserl Maric Einstein remained a mystery. In many respects, the story of Lieserl is inextricably linked to that of her mother, Mileva Maric, whose own story, as author Michele Zackheim came to learn, was vigilantly guarded for generations by her extended family in Serbia, whose confidence Zackheim had to earn before they would part with family secrets. After five years of travel to Serbian villages wracked by years of strife, painstaking forays into the labyrinth of Central European record-keeping, and hundreds of kitchen-table conversations; after following every lead and every flicker of intuition, and with the support of an international network of women, Michele Zackheim, in this account, has answered the question of what became of Lieserl Maric Einstein. Bound to be controversial, stunningly dramatic, Einstein's Daughter is more than the story of its conclusion; it is a story of the century - of fame and obscurity, love and betrayal, pretenders and protectors; of legends, lies, promises, and unbearable truths.

When Breath Becomes Air


Paul Kalanithi - 2016
    One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'" When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life


Eleanor Roosevelt - 1960
    Roosevelt expresses her philosophy of life by relating the experiences which have enabled her to cope with personal and public responsibilities.

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth


Chris Hadfield - 2013
    During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield's success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it. In An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, Col. Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement-and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counterintuitive lessons: don't visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff. You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth-especially your own.

The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist


Kerry Daynes - 2019
    The job: to delve into the psyche of convicted men and women to try to understand what lies behind their often brutal actions. Follow in the footsteps of Kerry Daynes, one of the most sought-after forensic psychologists in the business and consultant on major police investigations. Kerry's job has taken her to the cells of maximum-security prisons, police interview rooms, the wards of secure hospitals and the witness box of the court room. Her work has helped solve a cold case, convict the guilty and prevent a vicious attack. Spending every moment of your life staring into the darker side of life comes with a price. Kerry's frank memoir gives an unforgettable insight into the personal and professional dangers in store for a female psychologist working with some of the most disturbing men and women.

The Penguin Lessons


Tom Michell - 2015
    When the bird refuses to leave Tom's side, the young teacher has no choice but to take it with him and look after it. This is their story.

Medicine Men: Extreme Appalachian Doctoring


Carolyn Jourdan - 2012
    National bestseller "Medicine Men" follows the beloved #1 bestselling "Heart in the Right Place". This is a collection of the most memorable moments from more than a dozen rural physicians who each practiced medicine for more than 50 years in the Southern Appalachian Mountains from 1930-2012. Hilarious, heroic, true stories of miracle cures, ghost dogs, and much madcap medical mayhem. Unimaginably funny and touching situations where men with nerves of steel and hearts of gold get stuck between a rock and a hard place in the Smoky Mountains. These men are saints who walk among us and Jourdan's father is one of them. Jourdan's work is often compared to James Herriot and Bill Bryson. This story collection is like "All Creatures Great and Small" but with people instead of animals or vingnettes from country doctors who took "A Walk in the Woods".Jourdan's first book is on hundreds of lists of best books of the year, best book club books, and funniest books. "Heart in the Right Place" was chosen as Family Circle magazine's first ever Book of the Month, won the Elle magazine Reader's Prize, named a Wall Street Journal Nonfiction Bestseller and ranked #1 on Amazon in Biography, Memoir, Science, and Medicine.

From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death


Caitlin Doughty - 2017
    From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

Selected by Extraterrestrials: My life in the top secret world of UFOs, think-tanks, and Nordic secretaries


William Mills Tompkins - 2016
    He was personally present at the “Battle of L.A.” when a thousand rounds of ammo were fired at UFOs, and one of the Nordic craft may have selected him to be their rep in the evolving aerospace race. This book is a partial autobiography about his life to the beginning of the 1970s including some of his early work for TRW. Selected by the Navy prior to completing high school to be authorized for research work, he regularly visited classified Naval facilities during WWII until he was discharged in 1946. After working at North American Aviation and Northrop, he was hired by Douglas Aircraft Company in 1950, and when they found out about his involvement in classified work, was given a job as a to create design solutions as a draftsman with a peripheral assignment to work in a “think tank”. This work was partly controlled by the Navy personnel who used to work for James Forrestal, who was allegedly assassinated because he was going to publicly reveal what he knew about UFOs. Bill Tompkins was asked to conceive sketches of mile-long Naval interplanetary craft designs. Later, as he became involved in the conventional aspects of the Saturn Program that later became the Apollo launch vehicle, his insight to system engineering resulted in his offering some critical suggestions personally to Dr. Wernher von Braun about ensuring more reliable checkout using the missiles in their vertical position and also some very efficient launch control concepts adopted by both NASA and the Air Force. This story is peppered with very personal interactions with his co-workers and secretaries, some of whom the author believes to be Nordic aliens helping the “good guys” here on Earth. Towards the end of this volume of his autobiography, he sketches what he personally saw on TV when Armstrong was landing on the moon. Born in May 1923, Bill Tompkins is one of the few survivors of the “big war” who is still healthy, married to the same girl Mary, and is willing to tell his story about what he really did during his aerospace life in the 40s, 50s and 60s that relate to aliens, NASA and secrets that now can be told.

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating


Alan Alda - 2017
    With his trademark humor and frankness, Alan Alda explains what makes the out-of-the-box techniques he developed after his years as the host of Scientific American Frontiers so effective. This book reveals what it means to be a true communicator, and how we can communicate better, in every aspect of our lives—with our friends, lovers, and families, with our doctors, in business settings, and beyond.