She searches the apparently fertile world around her--the emergence of thirteen-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo--for signs that she is not alone. Boggs also explores other aspects of fertility and infertility: the way longing for a child plays out in the classic Coen brothers film Raising Arizona; the depiction of childlessness in literature, from Macbeth to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; the financial and legal complications that accompany alternative means of family making; the private and public expressions of iconic writers grappling with motherhood and fertility. She reports, with great empathy, complex stories of couples who adopted domestically and from overseas, LGBT couples considering assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and women and men reflecting on childless or child-free lives.In The Art of Waiting, Boggs deftly distills her time of waiting into an expansive contemplation of fertility, choice, and the many possible roads to making a life and making a family.

    The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.”So begins Susan Faludi’s extraordinary inquiry into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga. When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, that investigation would turn personal and urgent. How was this new parent who identified as “a complete woman now” connected to the silent, explosive, and ultimately violent father she had known, the photographer who’d built his career on the alteration of images?Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father’s many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest. When the author travels to Hungary to reunite with her father, she drops into a labyrinth of dark histories and dangerous politics in a country hell-bent on repressing its past and constructing a fanciful—and virulent—nationhood. The search for identity that has transfixed our century was proving as treacherous for nations as for individuals.Faludi’s struggle to come to grips with her father’s metamorphosis self takes her across borders—historical, political, religious, sexual--to bring her face to face with the question of the age: Is identity something you “choose,” or is it the very thing you can’t escape?

    But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to succumb to schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices and eventually suffering many breakdowns and hospitalizations.Divided Minds is a dual memoir of identical twins, one of whom faces a life sentence of schizophrenia, and the other who becomes a psychiatrist, after entering the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister. Told in the alternating voices of the sisters, Divided Minds is a heartbreaking account of the far reaches of madness, as well as the depths of ambivalence and love between twins. It is a true and unusually frank story of identical twins with very different identities and wildly different experiences of the world around them.

    A girl from a small, rural North Carolina mountain community faces the challenges of growing up in a severely dysfunctional family.

    She has managed to achieve this in spite of being diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a "grave" prognosis—and suffering the effects of her illness throughout her life.Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny 1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and night terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head and terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law school library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.So began Saks's long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who researches and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a wonderful man.In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the voices in her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a classic in the genre.

    Army, Lt. Col. Mark M. Weber was tapped to serve in a high-profile job within the Afghan Parliament as a military advisor. Weeks later, a routine physical revealed stage IV intestinal cancer in the thirty-eight-year-old father of three. Over the next two years, he would fight a desperate battle he wasn’t trained for, with his wife and boys as his reluctant but willing fighting force.When Weber realized that he was not going to survive this final tour of combat, he began to write a letter to his boys, so that as they grew up without him, they would know what his life-and-death story had taught him—about courage and fear, challenge and comfort, words and actions, pride and humility, seriousness and humor, and viewing life as a never-ending search for new ideas and inspiration.This book is that letter. And it’s not just for his sons. It’s for everyone who can use the best advice a dying hero has to offer. Weber’s stories illustrate that in the end, you become what you are through the causes to which you attach yourself—and that you’ve made your own along the way. Through his example, he teaches how to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way.

    Perfect for fans of An Unquiet Mind and The Bright Hour. Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in red chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life—Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home. Devastated by the grief of losing his mother, Vince is also consumed by an act so incomprehensible that it overshadows every happy memory of life growing up in his seemingly idyllic middle-class family. “In candid, smoothly unspooling prose, Granata reconstructs life and memory from grief, writing a moving testament to the therapy of art, the power of record, and his immutable love for his family” (Booklist).

    Stephen's Day, 2010, in St. John's, Newfoundland, when the author gives birth to a baby girl named Sadie Jane who has a shock of snow-white hair. News of the child's icy locks travels across the hospital, and physicians and nurses from all wards visit the unusually beautiful newborn as she lies sleeping in her plastic bassinet. The maternity-floor janitor, however, feels something is amiss. Her eyes wide, incredulous and panicky, the janitor asks, "Is she an albino?" The idea is immediately dismissed, but after three months of medical testing, Sadie is diagnosed with albinism, a rare genetic condition where pigment fails to form in the skin, hair and eyes. She is visually impaired and faces a lifetime avoiding the sun. She will always have the otherworldly appearance that drew the awestruck hospital staff to her side.A journalist and folklore scholar accustomed to processing the world through other people's stories, Emily is drawn to understanding her child's difference by researching the cultural beliefs associated with albinism worldwide. What she finds on her journey vacillates between beauty and darkness. She discovers that Noah's birth story is believed to be the first record of a baby born with albinism, and that the Kuna people in Panama revere members of their society with albinism, seeing them as defenders of the moon in the night sky. She attends a gathering of people with albinism in St. Louis and interviews geneticists, social scientists, novelists and folklorists in Canada, England and the US. But when she uncovers information about gruesome attacks on people with albinism in Tanzania, rooted in witchcraft, she feels compelled to travel to East Africa, her sun-shy toddler in tow, in an effort to understand these human-rights violations. Upon her return to Canada she discovers a family photograph from the past that might illuminate her daughter’s present. While navigating new territory as a first-time parent of a child with a disability, Emily embarks on a three-year journey across North America and Africa to discover how we explain human differences, not through scientific facts or statistics but through a system of cultural beliefs. Part parenting memoir, part cultural critique and part travelogue, Beyond the Pale, as the title suggests, takes the reader into dark and unknown territory in the search for enlightenment.

    Departing from the South Bronx and turning his sensitive eye to his own life and legacy, The Theft of Memory is Kozol's most personal book to date, as it explores the life of his father, Harry. Dr. Harry L. Kozol was a nationally-renowned neurologist whose work helped establish the emerging fields of forensic psychiatry and neuropsychiatry. He was a remarkable clinician with unusual capacity to diagnose and identify neurological and psychotic illnesses in highly complicated and sophisticated people, including well-known artists, writers, and intellectuals. Notably, in Eugene O'Neill's last years, the playwright moved to Boston so that he could live close to Kozol's father's office.In addition to his successful private practice in Boston, Kozol operated in a grim arena marked by extreme violence. But while his role as a forensic expert placed him in the public eye for high-profile criminal defendants such as Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler) and Patty Hearst, he was--as his son articulates--"a healer of tormented people, not their judge, not their interrogator."With the same lyricism and clarity that have defined Kozol's acclaimed work on education for decades,The Theft of Memory intimately describes Harry's vibrant life, the challenges following his self-diagnosis of Alzheimer's, and the evolution of their relationship throughout.This unique biography will have a long shelf life as a moving portrait of an extraordinary man, a window into the heart of one of our nation's foremost education activists, and a frank examination of how we come to terms with caregiving.

    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.

    And in these lairs, men trade the most devastatingly effective techniques ever invented to charm women. This is not fiction. These men really exist. They live together in houses known as Projects. And Neil Strauss, the bestselling author, spent two years living among them, using the pseudonym Style to protect his real-life identity. The result is one of the most explosive and controversial books of the year -- guaranteed to change the lives of men and transform the way women understand the opposite sex forever.On his journey from AFC (average frustrated chump) to PUA (pick-up artist) to PUG (pick-up guru), Strauss not only shares scores of original seduction techniques but also has unforgettable encounters with the likes of Tom Cruise, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Heidi Fleiss, and Courtney Love. And then things really start to get strange -- and passions lead to betrayals lead to violence. The Game is the story of one man's transformation from frog to prince -- to prisoner in the most unforgettable book of the year.

    Linda grew up in the iconic immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with her parents and a gifted older brother. But she spent her days at home alone with a mother who suffered major bouts of depression. At such times, young Linda was told, "Your mother…she’s not herself today." Those words did little to help Linda understand what she was witnessing. Instead, she experienced the anxiety and hyper-vigilance that often take root when secrecy and shame surround a family member who is ill. She’s Not Herself is a journey to make sense of the effects of multi-generational traumas. Shapiro is ultimately able to forgive (without forgetting) those who left her to fend for herself—and to provide readers with the wisdom of a seasoned psychotherapist who has examined human vulnerability in its many disguises and has moved through it all with dignity and hope. The result is a memoir of love, loss, loyalty, and healing.What others are saying:"An honest and compelling story by a brave and gifted writer." Wally Lamb, author of She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True; winner of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill's Kenneth Johnson Award for the anti-stigmatization of mental illness "A Story that applies to us all—truthful, carefully crafted, and created with a clear-eyed affection.” David Watts, MD, poet, writer, musician, NPR commentator "A riveting tale wrapped in elegant prose. A very human story—one of hope and perseverance that resonates deeply within the soul." Peggy Sanders, retired journalist, award-winning author “Lyrical and powerful in its use of story telling to subvert secrets and create new selfhood, this is a beautifully written memoir in the tradition of Eat, Pray, Love, Swallow The Ocean, Three Little Words, or Lucky Her Last Death.” Rachel Fichter, editor-at-large"For Shapiro's amazing recall and deep penetration into her past, this memoir reminds me of Remembrance of Things Past, and for its ease of readability, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” P. Topping, linguist "Inspiring and eloquent…vividly captures the cultural context of an immigrant family living with the trauma of mental illness and its effect on all family relationships.” Joseph Giordano, LCSW, co-editor, Ethnicity and Family Therapy "A compelling tale of human tragedy and triumph told with empathy and love, without sentimentality…offering a sense of awe for the human spirit.” Pamposh Dhar, founder of the Terataii Reiki and Counseling Centre, Singapore, Reiki healer/teacher/counselor/blogger "One feels privileged to share each of the traumas that Shapiro, her mother, and her mother before her had to endure. As to the writing, such complete recall is preserved for all time. Look to your laurels, Marcel Proust." Frederick Rolf, actor, director, co-author, translator, Berlin-Shanghai, New York: My Family's Flight From Hitler "Not another 'woe is me' account of dysfunction, but rather a heroic account of mastery and grace, which the general reading public as well as students and professionals will benefit from reading.” Roberta Temes, PhD, author of several books, including Learning How to Write a Memoir in Thirty Days "With extraordinary insight and honesty, Shapiro shares with us her journey from infinite pain to knowledge, healing, and forgiveness without a trace of melodrama. A truly inspiring read!" R.G.Sterling, musician, educator

    It's the story she wrote for America's millions of adult children of alcoholics, people who don't drink, yet suffer from and need help against the ravages of this insidious disease. And it's a story of incredible courage, a candid, sometimes shocking autobiography of a woman who dared to face the dark side of her soul and triumph over it.

    Now, in her stirring new memoir Confessions of a Childfree Woman, Drut-Davis tells the story behind that national TV appearance and recounts the painful aftermath.Along the way, Drut-Davis exposes and explores our culture’s rampant pronatalism and the stigma we continue to attach to childless women. By taking us deep into her own life and the emotions—positive and negative—surrounding her bold choice, Drut-Davis lays bare our society’s myth that true fulfillment and happiness can come only through procreation.Reflecting on her 70 years, Drut-Davis takes a fair look at what she’s lost by not having children, but her focus always returns to all she has gained: a life lived with no regrets.

    Truthfully, thought had little to do with it.  Instinct did--the instinct to seize a sure and ebullient happiness or go down trying.” Falling in love is arguably the greatest risk and leap of faith any of us take.  There’s no guarantee for future happiness, no protection from the ugly scars of the past, no shield from tragedy--this powerful memoir reminds us why we bother.At a lakeside café in the summer of 1988, 31-year-old Glenda Burgess is sitting across from 44-year-old Kenneth Grunzweig and falling in love. Then Ken confesses that he has already been widowed twice, under harrowing circumstances. This tragic past, the age difference, Ken’s emotionally scarred teenage daughter--all might be enough to send anyone running, but Glenda believed in her instincts, believed more than anything that this lovely, generous man would shape her life. And Ken, who with his heartbreaking losses had long said that he’d given up on love, came to share a sense of their romantic destiny. The two embark on the sort of love affair that many of us don’t believe exist anymore--a grand romance that buoys them through the birth of two kids and fifteen magical years of marriage until tragedy strikes again in the form of a shadowy spot on Ken’s lung. The journey that follows will test their resilience and strengthen their devotion.The Geography of Love is a book about believing in first instincts and second chances.It is a poignant exploration of the depths of the human heart and our ability to love and to trust no matter the obstacles.It is a reminder that “real” life is always richer, stranger, and more extraordinary than fiction.It is the most moving love story you’ll read this year.