After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony—and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

    Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner is a love letter to an extraordinary ordinary life. In Sandra Pankhurst she discovered a woman capable of taking a lifetime of hostility and transphobic abuse and using it to care for some of society's most in-need people.Sandra Pankhurst founded her trauma cleaning business to help people whose emotional scars are written on their houses. From the forgotten flat of a drug addict to the infested home of a hoarder, Sandra enters properties and lives at the same time. But few of the people she looks after know anything of the complexity of Sandra's own life. Raised in an uncaring home, Sandra's miraculous gift for warmth and humour in the face of unspeakable personal tragedy mark her out as a one-off.

    He followed his head over his gut and Karina was left permanently paralysed, altering both patient and surgeon's lives for ever. This decision would haunt Rahul for decades, a constant reminder of the fine line between saving and damaging a life.As one of the world's leading brain surgeons, Rahul is the last hope for patients with extreme forms of cancer. In treating them, he has observed humanity at its most raw and most robust. He has journeyed to unimaginable extremes with them, guiding them through the darkest moments of their lives.Life on a Knife's Edge is Rahul's beautifully written account of the resilience, courage and belief he has witnessed in his patients, and the lessons about human nature he has learned from them. It is about the impossible choices he has to make, and the fateful consequences he is forced to live with.From challenging the ethics of surgical practices, to helping a patient with locked-in syndrome communicate her dying wish to her family, Rahul shares his extraordinary experiences, revealing the depths of a surgeon's psyche that is continuously pushed to its limits.

    Six weeks later they ordered their first microphones and the rest is history. From the hosts of the hit podcast RedHanded (dubbed by Anna Paquin as her “all- time favorite true crime podcast”), Bala and Maguire have amassed a cult following of “spooky bitches.”What is it about killers, cults, and cannibals that capture our imaginations even as they terrify and disturb us? Do we find these stories endlessly and equally compelling and frightening, because they hold up a mirror to society’s failings and to the horrors that we humans are capable of? RedHanded rejects the outdated narrative of killers as monsters and that a victim “was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Instead, it dissects the stories of killers in a way that challenges perceptions and asks the hard questions about society, gender, poverty, culture, and even our politics.With their trademark humor, research on real-life cases, and unflinching analysis of what makes a criminal, Bala and Maguire take you through what drives the most extreme of human behavior to find out once and for all: what makes a killer tick?

    It would emerge that, like Vicky, 220 other women who were diagnosed with cervical cancer were not informed that a clinical audit -carried out by the national screen programme CervicalCheck - had revised their earlier, negative smear tests. Their cancers could possibly have been preventable.Since then, Vicky has become women's voice for justice on the issue, and her system-changing activism has made her a household name.In her memoir Overcoming, Vicky shares her remarkable personal story, from a life-threatening accident in early adulthood through to motherhood, a battle with depression, her devastating later discovery that her cancer had returned in shocking circumstances - and the ensuing detective-like scrutiny of events that led the charge for her history-making legal action.An inspiring story of rare resilience and power, Overcoming is an account of how one woman can move mountains - even when she is fighting for her own life - and of finding happiness and strength in the toughest of times.'Calls to mind the work of Emilie Pine, or the memoir by Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am ... Overcoming is more than the retelling of an extraordinary life. Its pacing and gentleness leaves plenty of room for tears and for reflection' Irish Independent

    A deeply personal story, Bruno talks about his battle with mental illness, his time inside a mental facility, the impact his illness has had on his family and his career - and his long road back to stability. Now ready to talk about the condition that devastated his world, Frank's story offers his own unique perspective on living with bipolar disorder. His fears, his triumphs and the great affection he feels for the legion of fans he has to this day. His aim is to give others hope and inspiration. "Ever since I retired, one thing has stood between me and being the man I want to be. My mind. "In the end it saw me locked up against my will and pumped full of so many drugs I didn't have the strength to stand. When I am in the grip of my bipolar disorder and the drugs are pickling my brain I am unable to stand for days. But I will always get back up. It is the only way I know."

    She was also generous. When Anna proposed an all-expenses-paid trip to Marrakech, Rachel jumped at the chance. But when Anna’s credit cards mysteriously stopped working, the dream vacation quickly took a dark turn. Anna asked Rachel to begin fronting costs—first for flights, then meals and shopping, and, finally, for their $7,500-per-night private villa. Before Rachel knew it, more than $62,000 had been charged to her credit cards. Anna swore she would reimburse Rachel the moment they returned to New York. Back in Manhattan, the repayment never materialized, and a shocking pattern of deception emerged. Rachel learned that Anna had left a trail of deceit—and unpaid bills—wherever she’d been. Mortified, Rachel contacted the district attorney, and in a stunning turn of events, found herself helping to bring down one of the city’s most notorious con artists.

    The events in this book unveil one of the worst serial killing sprees in Australian history. Over the course of two months in 1976-1977, seven young women were brutally raped and murdered. Worrell and Miller met in prison, and upon release, developed a dominant and submissive relationship that centred around feeding Worrell's sadistic urges towards women. Miller would deny any involvement in the murders, claiming his love for Worrell was the basis for his cooperation and silence. In the space of twelve months between 1978-1979, remains of two of the victims were found within 1km of one another. Police linked the two bodies with another five young females reported missing in the area. The police uncovered two more skeletons within the Truro region and now faced the difficult task of piecing together the evidence and finding the countries biggest serial killers. The Truro Murders portrays the sex-fuelled killing spree from the perspective of James Miller, the accomplice. Contained within this shocking true crime story are love, loss, manipulation, and extreme violence. If you are especially sensitive to accounts of suffering young females, it might be advisable not to read any further. If, however, you seek to understand the darker side of human nature by coming face to face with it, then this book is written for you. Scroll up and click on the Buy Now button at the top of this page.

    We know, for example, that there are a few core truths to science of happiness. We know that being kind and altruistic makes us happy, that turning off devices, talking to people, forging relationships, living with meaning and delving into the concerns of others offer our best chance at achieving happiness. But how do we retain happiness? It often slips out of our hands as quickly as we find it. So, when we are exposed to, or learn, good things, how do we continue to burn with them?And more than that, when our world goes dark, when we're overwhelmed by illness or heartbreak, loss or pain, how do we survive, stay alive or even bloom? In the muck and grit of a daily existence full of disappointments and a disturbing lack of control over many of the things that matter most - finite relationships, fragile health, fraying economies, a planet in peril - how do we find, nurture and carry our own inner, living light - a light to ward off the darkness?Absorbing, achingly beautiful, inspiring and deeply moving, Julia Baird has written exactly the book we need for these times.

    In a lab filled with curiosities--beakers, microscopes, Bunsen burners, and hundreds upon hundreds of books--sat an investigator who would go on to crack at least two thousand cases in his forty-year career. Known as the "American Sherlock Holmes," Edward Oscar Heinrich was one of America's greatest--and first--forensic scientists, with an uncanny knack for finding clues, establishing evidence, and deducing answers with a skill that seemed almost supernatural.Heinrich was one of the nation's first expert witnesses, working in a time when the turmoil of Prohibition led to sensationalized crime reporting and only a small, systematic study of evidence. However with his brilliance, and commanding presence in both the courtroom and at crime scenes, Heinrich spearheaded the invention of a myriad of new forensic tools that police still use today, including blood spatter analysis, ballistics, lie-detector tests, and the use of fingerprints as courtroom evidence. His work, though not without its serious--some would say fatal--flaws, changed the course of American criminal investigation.Based on years of research and thousands of never-before-published primary source materials, American Sherlock captures the life of the man who pioneered the science our legal system now relies upon--as well as the limits of those techniques and the very human experts who wield them.

    From the street slang that was once known as 'going country' - it sees powerful drugs gangs supplying outside of the capital through an underworld 'emerging markets enterprise', using children as young as 12 and vulnerable men and women to do their dirty work.Teens whose bereaved relatives assume they led ordinary lives, who tell us they were 'good kids', suddenly end up stabbed to death with no seeming motive. At night, on a usually quiet suburban street, a massive knife fight erupts and two kids end up on life support. Their parents tell the news they weren't in a gang ... What is really going on?

    Army. Defying all known accepted military practice -- and indeed, the laws of physics -- they believed that a soldier could adopt a cloak of invisibility, pass cleanly through walls, and, perhaps most chillingly, kill goats just by staring at them. Entrusted with defending America from all known adversaries, they were the First Earth Battalion. And they really weren't joking. What's more, they're back and fighting the War on Terror. With firsthand access to the leading players in the story, Ronson traces the evolution of these bizarre activities over the past three decades and shows how they are alive today within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and in postwar Iraq. Why are they blasting Iraqi prisoners of war with the theme tune to Barney the Purple Dinosaur? Why have 100 debleated goats been secretly placed inside the Special Forces Command Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina? How was the U.S. military associated with the mysterious mass suicide of a strange cult from San Diego? The Men Who Stare at Goats answers these and many more questions.

    Which should be around 65 million people in the UK alone.Matt Forde has been obsessed with politics ever since he was 9 years old. Raised by a single mum on benefits in inner city Nottingham, he joined the Socialist Workers Party as soon as he could, foisted issues of Marxism Today on innocent bystanders and attended his first political party conference. From then on, despite some career suicide moments such as chatting to the Prime Minister at Number 10 while badly drunk, Matt's whole future looked wedded to the Labour Party as he started working for MPs in dingy back rooms in Nottinghamshire.But then Labour started to fall apart, and so did Matt's sense of purpose. With the rise of Corbyn, Brexit and Trump, his love for politics that had been so profound began to quickly crumble.Exploring themes such as tribalism, the curse of complacency and why some politicians refuse to speak normally, Politically Homeless is a hugely entertaining book of (often hilarious) personal stories and thought-provoking insights into this complicated world. And despite everything, Matt's passion is still there. Through hosting his award-winning weekly podcast, 'The Political Party' (over 5 million downloads) involving interviews with some of politics' most powerful and notorious figures including Tony Blair, Nicola Sturgeon, Sadiq Khan, Michael Heseltine, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg and performing critically acclaimed stand-up comedy shows, Matt has been able to keep enough faith that politics will get better. Maybe.

    What would happen to her five unintentionally abandoned children? The heartbreak of the devastating loss of my mother was just the beginning of a series of tragic events that shaped my childhood. Lost in the chaos of abuse, I was the unseen collateral damage of domestic violence. I was forced to take on the role of the invisible child for self-preservation. I figured you can’t hurt what you can’t see. Despite all the sadness in this book, my story has a happy ending. Overcoming obstacles that were meant to destroy me taught me many powerful lessons about strength, resilience, and faith. I want to show you that no matter how dark your world seems, there is a light shining right outside the door. You just need to have faith and keep moving forward step by step until you find your peace. Trust me, no matter where your story lies, you can find happiness.

    Judy Melinek’s Working Stiff, an account of the hair-raising and heartbreaking cases handled by the coroner of Marin County, California throughout his four decades on the job—from high-profile deaths to serial killers, to Golden Gate Bridge suicides.Marin County, California is a study in contradictions. Its natural beauty attracts thousands of visitors every year, yet the county also is home to San Quentin Prison, one of the oldest and largest penitentiaries in the country. Marin ranks in the top one percent of counties nationwide in terms of affluence and overall health, yet it is far above the norm in drug overdoses and alcoholism, and comprises a large percentage of suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge. Ken Holmes worked in the Marin County Coroner’s Office for thirty-six years, starting as a death investigator and ending as the three-term, elected coroner. As he grew into the job—which is different from what is depicted on television—Holmes learned a variety of skills, from finding hidden clues at death scenes, interviewing witnesses effectively, managing bystanders and reporters, preparing testimony for court to notifying families of a death with sensitivity and compassion. He also learned about different kinds of firearms, all types of drugs—prescription and illegal—and about certain unexpected and potentially fatal phenomena such as autoeroticism. Complete with poignant anecdotes, The Education of a Coroner provides a firsthand and fascinating glimpse into the daily life of a public servant whose work is dark and mysterious yet necessary for society to function.