She entered the sex industry at age 18, and has worked as a stripper, porn and as an escort. She currently works as an escort under the alias Gia James. She has written for magazines like Frankie, Vice and Penthouse Australia, and had a monthly sex and dating column for Sneaky magazine. She had her first solo photographic exhibition "Gemini" in 2016 at Goodspace Gallery in Sydney. The exhibit played on the juxtaposition of light and dark, and was centered around themes of sexuality, kink, femininity and fantasy. She is also the author of 4 self published zines - Zero Vol. 1 + 2, Heartbreaker and Fantasy. The zines focus on short stories about her life as a sex worker and discuss relationships, love, grief, mental health and sex. She distributes the zines through her Instagram and website. Rita is currently undertaking her Bachelor of Philosophy and working towards a career as an academic, specializing in the field of Gender Studies with a focus on sex work.

    Lara, a superstar nurse who tries to battle her way back from a near-ruinous prescription-drug addiction. The outspoken but compassionate Juliette, a fierce advocate for her patients. And Sam, a first-year nurse, struggling to find her way in a gossipy mean-girl climate she likens to “high school, except for the dying people.”The result is a riveting page-turner, insightful and thought-provoking, that will leave readers feeling smarter about their healthcare and undeniably appreciative of the incredible nurses who provide it.

    Rick Hodes arrived in Africa more than two decades ago to help the victims of a famine, but he never expected to call this extremely poor continent his home. Twenty-eight years later, he is still there. This is a Soul tells the remarkable story of Rick Hodes’s journey from suburban America to Mother Teresa’s clinic in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.As a boy, Rick was devoted to helping those in need, and eventually he determined that becoming a doctor would allow him to do the most good. When he heard about famine in Africa, that’s where he went, and when genocide convulsed Rwanda, he went into the refugee camps to minister to the victims. When he was told that Ethiopia was allowing its Jews to emigrate to Israel, he went to help. While there, he was drawn to Mother Teresa’s mission in Addis Ababa. It was there that Rick found his calling when he began caring for the sickest children in one of the world's poorest countries. But he did more than that—he began taking them into his home and officially adopted five of them.Marilyn Berger went to Africa to write about Dr. Hodes, but while there, she became involved with the story. When she came upon a small, deformed, and malnourished boy begging on the street, she recognized immediately that he had the exact disease Rick could cure. She took him to Rick, who eventually arranged for the boy to have a complicated and risky surgery, which turned out to be incredibly successful. The boy’s story—intertwined with Rick’s, and Marilyn's as well—is unforgettable in its pathos and subtle humor.This is a Soul is not just a story of the savior and the saved, it is a celebration of love and wisdom, and an exploration of how charity and devotion can actually change lives in an overcrowded, unjust, and often harsh world.

    Ten years later, she is a psychologist running her own clinic, an award-winning writer, and happily married. The transformation in her life was brought about by Prozac. Prozac Diary is Lauren Slater's incisive account of a life restored to productivity, creativity, and love. When she wakes up one morning and finds that her demons no longer have a hold on her, Slater struggles with the strange state of being well after a lifetime of craziness. Yet this is no hymn to a miracle pharmaceutical. It is a frankly ambivalent quest for the truth of self behind an ongoing reliance on a drug. Slater also addresses Prozac's notorious "poop-out" effect and its devastating attack on her libido. This is the first memoir to reflect on long-term Prozac use, and reviewers agree that no one has written about Prozac with such beauty, honesty, and insight.

    But he was alive and trapped inside his own body for ten years.In January 1988 Martin Pistorius, aged twelve, fell inexplicably sick. First he lost his voice and stopped eating. Then he slept constantly and shunned human contact. Doctors were mystified. Within eighteen months he was mute and wheelchair-bound. Martin's parents were told an unknown degenerative disease left him with the mind of a baby and less than two years to live.Martin was moved to care centers for severely disabled children. The stress and heartache shook his parents’ marriage and their family to the core. Their boy was gone. Or so they thought.Ghost Boy is the heart-wrenching story of one boy’s return to life through the power of love and faith. In these pages, readers see a parent’s resilience, the consequences of misdiagnosis, abuse at the hands of cruel caretakers, and the unthinkable duration of Martin’s mental alertness betrayed by his lifeless body.We also see a life reclaimed—a business created, a new love kindled—all from a wheelchair. Martin's emergence from his own darkness invites us to celebrate our own lives and fight for a better life for others.

    At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs--her Jewish background. Tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to "repair the world," with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II. We see the influence of her mother, Celia Amster Bader, whose intellect inspired her daughter's feminism, insisting that Ruth become independent, as she witnessed her mother coping with terminal cervical cancer (Celia died the day before Ruth, at seventeen, graduated from high school). From Ruth's days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn's James Madison High School, to Cornell University, Harvard and Columbia Law Schools (first in her class), to being a law professor at Rutgers University (one of the few women in the field and fighting pay discrimination), hiding her second pregnancy so as not to risk losing her job; founding the Women's Rights Law Reporter, writing the brief for the first case that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down a sex-discriminatory state law, then at Columbia (the law school's first tenured female professor); becoming the director of the women's rights project of the ACLU, persuading the Supreme Court in a series of decisions to ban laws that denied women full citizenship status with men. Her years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, deciding cases the way she played golf, as she, left-handed, played with right-handed clubs--aiming left, swinging right, hitting down the middle. Her years on the Supreme Court . . . A pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, on American society, on our American character and spirit, will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

    For the next decade she was shuttled through the brothels that make up the sprawling sex trade of Southeast Asia. Trapped in this dangerous and desperate world, she suffered the brutality and horrors of human trafficking—rape, torture, deprivation—until she managed to escape with the help of a French aid worker. Emboldened by her newfound freedom, education, and security, Somaly blossomed but remained haunted by the girls in the brothels she left behind.Written in exquisite, spare, unflinching prose, The Road of Lost Innocence recounts the experiences of her early life and tells the story of her awakening as an activist and her harrowing and brave fight against the powerful and corrupt forces that steal the lives of these girls. She has orchestrated raids on brothels and rescued sex workers, some as young as five and six; she has built shelters, started schools, and founded an organization that has so far saved more than four thousand women and children in Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. Her memoir will leave you awestruck by her tenacity and courage and will renew your faith in the power of an individual to bring about change.

    Kear's biggest concern is choosing a major--until she walks into a doctor's office in midtown Manhattan and gets a life-changing diagnosis. She is going blind, courtesy of an eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa, and has only a decade or so before Lights Out. Instead of making preparations as the doctor suggests, Kear decides to carpe diem and make the most of the vision she has left. She joins circus school, tears through boyfriends, travels the world, and through all these hi-jinks, she keeps her vision loss a secret.When Kear becomes a mother, just a few years shy of her vision's expiration date, she amends her carpe diem strategy, giving up recklessness in order to relish every moment with her kids. Her secret, though, is harder to surrender - and as her vision deteriorates, harder to keep hidden. As her world grows blurred, one thing becomes clear: no matter how hard she fights, she won't win the battle against blindness. But if she comes clean with her secret, and comes to terms with the loss, she can still win her happy ending.Told with humor and irreverence, Now I See You is an uplifting story about refusing to cower at life's curveballs, about the power of love to triumph over fear. But, at its core, it's a story about acceptance: facing the truths that just won't go away, and facing yourself, broken parts and all.

    Alvord left a dusty reservation in New Mexico for Stanford University Medical School, becoming the first Navajo woman surgeon. Rising above the odds presented by her own culture and the male-dominated world of surgeons, she returned to the reservation to find a new challenge. In dramatic encounters, Dr. Alvord witnessed the power of belief to influence health, for good or for ill. She came to merge the latest breakthroughs of medical science with the ancient tribal paths to recovery and wellness, following the Navajo philosophy of a balanced and harmonious life, called Walking in Beauty. And now, in bringing these principles to the world of medicine, The Scalpel and the Silver Bear joins those few rare works, such as Healing and the Mind, whose ideas have changed medical practices-and our understanding of the world.

    Now comes her highly anticipated first book featuring her signature combination of honesty, humor, and direct, no-nonsense advice.Each chapter of Girl, Wash Your Face begins with a specific lie Hollis once believed that left her feeling overwhelmed, unworthy, or ready to give up. As a working mother, a former foster parent, and a woman who has dealt with insecurities about her body and relationships, she speaks with the insight and kindness of a BFF, helping women unpack the limiting mind-sets that destroy their self-confidence and keep them from moving forward.From her temporary obsession with marrying Matt Damon to a daydream involving hypnotic iguanas to her son's request that she buy a necklace to "be like the other moms," Hollis holds nothing back. With unflinching faith and tenacity, Hollis spurs other women to live with passion and hustle and to awaken their slumbering goals.

    She lost thirty pounds, chugged antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer.As she navigates the aftermath of her diagnosis, Kate pulls the reader deeply into her life, which is populated with a colorful, often hilarious collection of friends, pastors, parents, and doctors, and shares her laser-sharp reflections on faith, friendship, love, and death. She wonders why suffering makes her feel like a loser and explores the burden of positivity. Trying to relish the time she still has with her son and husband, she realizes she must change her habit of skipping to the end and planning the next move. A historian of the "American prosperity gospel"--the creed of the mega-churches that promises believers a cure for tragedy, if they just want it badly enough--Bowler finds that, in the wake of her diagnosis, she craves these same "outrageous certainties." She wants to know why it's so hard to surrender control over that which you have no control. She contends with the terrifying fact that, even for her husband and child, she is not the lynchpin of existence, and that even without her, life will go on.On the page, Kate Bowler is warm, witty, and ruthless, and, like Paul Kalanithi, one of the talented, courageous few who can articulate the grief she feels as she contemplates her own mortality.

    Brilliant, driven, but haunted by demons, William Stewart Halsted took surgery from a horrific, dangerous practice to what we now know as a lifesaving art. Halsted was born to wealth and privilege in New York City in the mid-1800s. He attended the finest schools, but he was a mediocre student. His academic interests blossomed at medical school and he quickly became a celebrated surgeon. Experimenting with cocaine as a local anesthetic, he became addicted. He was hospitalized and treated with morphine to control his craving for cocaine. For the remaining 40 years of his life he was addicted to both drugs.Halsted resurrected his career at Johns Hopkins, where he became the first chief of surgery. Among his accomplishments, he introduced the residency training system, the use of sterile gloves, the first successful hernia repair, radical mastectomy, fine silk sutures, and anatomically correct surgical technique. Halsted is without doubt the father of modern surgery, and his eccentric behavior, unusual lifestyle, and counterintuitive productivity in the face of lifelong addiction make his story unusually compelling.Gerald Imber, a renowned surgeon himself, evokes Halsted's extraordinary life and achievements and places them squarely in the historical and social context of the late 19th century. The result is an illuminating biography of a complex and troubled man, whose genius we continue to benefit from today.

    Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband T.J. and their toddler Daniel holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation, performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines flight 587.Lively, action-packed, and loaded with mordant wit, Working Stiff offers a firsthand account of daily life in one of America's most arduous professions, and the unexpected challenges of shuttling between the domains of the living and the dead. The body never lies, and through the murders, accidents, and suicides that land on her table, Dr. Melinek lays bare the truth behind the glamorized depictions of autopsy work on shows like CSI and Law and Order to reveal the secret story of the real morgue.

    Now: actress, single working mother of teenage rock star, and weight-loss inspiration to millions. We all knew and loved Valerie Bertinelli years ago when she played girl-next-door cutie Barbara Cooper in the hit TV show "One Day at a Time," and then starred in numerous TV movies. From wholesome primetime in America's living rooms, Valerie moved to late nights with the hardest-partying band of the decadent eighties when she became, at twenty, wife to rock guitarist Eddie Van Halen. Losing It is Valerie's frank account of her life backstage and in the spotlight. Here are the ups and downs of teen stardom, of her complicated marriage to a brilliant, tormented musical genius, and of her very public struggle with her weight.

    "A graphic account of what it's like when a doctor crosses to the other side of the table and becomes a patient himself."—Parade Magazine