A Short History of England


Simon Jenkins - 2011
    Its triumphs and disasters are instantly familiar, from the Norman Conquest to the two world wars, but to fully understand their significance we need to know the whole story.A Short History of England sheds light on all the key individuals and events, bringing them together in an enlightening and engaging account of the country's birth, rise to global prominence and then partial eclipse.

The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language


Mark Forsyth - 2012
    Pretending to work? That’s fudgelling, which may lead to rizzling if you feel sleepy after lunch, though by dinner time you will have become a sparkling deipnosophist.From Mark Forsyth, author of the bestselling The Etymologicon, this is a book of weird words for familiar situations. From ante-jentacular to snudge by way of quafftide and wamblecropt, at last you can say, with utter accuracy, exactly what you mean.

The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980


Elaine Showalter - 1985
    A vital counter-interpretation of madness in women, showing how it is often a consequence of, rather than a deviation from, the traditional female role.

Positive: One Doctor's Personal Encounters with Death, Life, and the US Healthcare System


Michael Saag - 2014
    Saag, MD, an internationally known expert on the virus that causes AIDS, but the book is more than a memoir: through his story, Dr. Saag also shines a light on the dysfunctional US healthcare system, proposing optimistic yet realistic remedies drawn from his distinguished medical career.Mike Saag began his medical residency in 1981, within days of the Centers for Disease Control’s first report of a mysterious “gay cancer” killing young men. Soon, the young doctor’s career was yoked to the epidemic. His life’s work became turning the most deadly virus in human history into a chronic, manageable disease.In the lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Dr. Saag and colleagues made seminal early discoveries about the elusive virus. And at the AIDS clinic he founded, Dr. Saag met people whose fight against a virtual death sentence touched his heart and inspired him to work even harder. As his career stretched across three decades, Dr. Saag found himself battling another foe, this one almost as pernicious as AIDS itself: a broken healthcare system shaped more by politicians, insurers, and lobbyists than by patients’ needs.Positive is Dr. Saag’s tribute to the unforgettable patients he has known and an urgent call to create a comprehensive, compassionate, accessible healthcare system in the name of those we can save today.

Healing Children: A Surgeon's Stories from the Frontiers of Pediatric Medicine


Kurt Newman - 2017
    As the current CEO of Children's National in Washington, D.C., the author presents an argument to place children's medical requirements and their need to thrive well into adulthood at the forefront of American medicine, and he admits that 'these kids have been my real teachers

Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague


David K. Randall - 2019
    His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn’t noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin—a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong’s tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed ten million lives worldwide.To local press, railroad barons, and elected officials, such a possibility was inconceivable—or inconvenient. As they mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, ending the career of one of the most brilliant scientists in the nation in the process, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save a city that refused to be rescued. Spearheading a relentless crusade for sanitation, Blue and his men patrolled the squalid streets of fast-growing San Francisco, examined gory black buboes, and dissected diseased rats that put the fate of the entire country at risk.In the tradition of Erik Larson and Steven Johnson, Randall spins a spellbinding account of Blue’s race to understand the disease and contain its spread—the only hope of saving San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate.

He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter's Quest to Know Him


Mimi Baird - 2015
    Perry Baird was a rising medical star in the late 1920s and 1930s. Early in his career, ahead of his time, he grew fascinated with identifying the biochemical root of manic depression, just as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking experiments were published, Dr. Baird had been institutionalized multiple times, his medical license revoked, and his wife and daughters estranged. He later received a lobotomy and died from a consequent seizure, his research incomplete, his achievements unrecognized.Mimi Baird grew up never fully knowing this story, as her family went silent about the father who had been absent for most of her childhood. Decades later, a string of extraordinary coincidences led to the recovery of a manuscript which Dr. Baird had worked on throughout his brutal institutionalization, confinement, and escape. This remarkable document, reflecting periods of both manic exhilaration and clear-headed health, presents a startling portrait of a man who was a uniquely astute observer of his own condition, struggling with a disease for which there was no cure, racing against time to unlock the key to treatment before his illness became impossible to manage.Fifty years after being told her father would forever be “ill” and “away,” Mimi Baird set off on a quest to piece together the memoir and the man. In time her fingers became stained with the lead of the pencil he had used to write his manuscript, as she devoted herself to understanding who he was, why he disappeared, and what legacy she had inherited. The result of his extraordinary record and her journey to bring his name to light is He Wanted the Moon, an unforgettable testament to the reaches of the mind and the redeeming power of a determined heart.Soon to be a major motion picture, from Brad Pitt and Tony Kushner

The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick


Gene Stone - 2010
    . . a great read,"" and that has been praised as ""a delightful dance through science"" ("New York Times "bestselling author Mark Hyman, M.D.) and as a ""remarkable and insightful book [that] offers you the chance to achieve the best health of your life"" (Mark Liponis, M.D., Medical Director, Canyon Ranch).Written by bestselling author Gene Stone, "The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick "arose from his desire to discover what might actually prevent him from getting sick himself. This book, the result of that exploration, tells the stories of twenty-five people who each possess a different secret of excellent health--a secret that makes sense and that Stone discovered has a true scientific underpinning. There are food secrets--why to take garlic and vitamin C, eat more probiotics, becomea vegan, drink a tonic of brewer's yeast. Exercise secrets--the benefits of lifting weights, the power of stretching. Environmental secrets--living in a Blue Zone, understanding the value of germs. Emotional secrets--seek out and stay in touch with friends, cultivate your spirituality. Physical secrets--nap more, take cold showers in the morning. And the wisdom that goes back generations: Yes, chicken soup works.The stories make it personal, the research makes it real, and the do-it-yourself information shows how to integrate each secret into your own life, and become the next person who never gets sick.

Zero Hour for Gen X: How the Last Adult Generation Can Save America from Millennials


Matthew Hennessey - 2018
    Soon Gen Xers will be the only cohort of Americans who remember life as it was lived before the arrival of the Internet. They are, as Hennessey dubs them, “the last adult generation,” the sole remaining link to a time when childhood was still a bit dangerous but produced adults who were naturally resilient. More than a decade into the social media revolution, the American public is waking up to the idea that the tech sector’s intentions might not be as pure as advertised. The mountains of money being made off our browsing habits and purchase histories are used to fund ever-more extravagant and utopian projects that, by their very natures, will corrode the foundations of free society, leaving us all helpless and digitally enslaved to an elite crew of ultra-sophisticated tech geniuses. But it’s not too late to turn the tide. There’s still time for Gen X to write its own future. A spirited defense of free speech, eye contact, and the virtues of patience, Zero Hour for Gen X is a cultural history of the last 35 years, an analysis of the current social and historical moment, and a generational call to arms.