Book picks similar to
Locked In: One man's miraculous escape from the terrifying confines of Locked-in syndrome by Richard Marsh
medical
biography
memoir
autobiographies
Heartsounds: The Story of a Love and Loss
Martha Weinman Lear - 1980
Her husband having died of heart disease, Martha Weinman Lear articulates her feelings toward the medical treatment, her personal strengths and weaknesses, and how she survived her own fears.
The Chinaberry Tree
Lauren Alexander - 2011
The family is powerful for the same reasons it is vulnerable. There are deadlines for nurturing and restoring relationships, and, with its intricate makeup, it takes the entire family to save itself. THE CHINABERRY TREE is a rare memoir of a family at war with itself. It lays bare the erosion of the author's family of origin in the absence of divorce and any criminal or heinous behavior. Perception is the pivotal force in the family. This innovative memoir offers a slideshow viewing of the interwoven dynamics that fueled the author's original family life: harmony, humor, separation, sorrow, discord, despair, surrender and death. The youngest of four children, the author presents each and every family member, including herself, from the unusual viewpoint of an insider with no agenda, an insider spreading out pieces of a puzzle with no intention of finding the missing ones. Making no pretense of telling the whole story, she revisits her life within the family. The author began writing THE CHINABERRY TREE long before her family's fate had run its course. In the end, the author discovers that the undying family bond she counted on was a deep-rooted myth she cultivated amidst all the evidence to the contrary. In ruins, the family finally loses its power over her and the grief the author thought she would carry to her grave is put to rest.
Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History's Great Personalities
Claudia Kalb - 2016
From Marilyn Monroe's borderline personality disorder to Charles Darwin's anxiety, Kalb provides compelling insight into a broad range of maladies, using historical records and interviews with leading mental health experts, biographers, sociologists, and other specialists. Packed with intriguing revelations, this smart narrative brings a new perspective to one of the hottest new topics in today's cultural conversation.
Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine
Candace B. Pert - 1997
Her pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these new scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies -- body-minds -- in ways we could never possibly have imagined before. Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.
Country Doctor: Tales of a Rural GP
Michael Sparrow - 2002
From coping with the suicide of a colleague to the unusual whereabouts of a jar of Colman's mustard, the story follows this rural doctor's misguided attempts to make sense of the career in which he has unwittingly found himself.
The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases
Gary Small - 2010
Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New MindA psychiatrist’s stories of his most bizarre cases, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head by Gary Small, M.D., and Gigi Vorgan—co-authors of The Memory Bible—offers a fascinating and highly entertaining look into the peculiarities of the human mind. In the vein of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and the other bestselling works of Oliver Sacks, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head surprises, enthralls, and illuminates as it focuses on medical mysteries that would stump and amaze the brilliant brains on House, M.D.
Still Got It, Never Lost It
Louie Spence - 2011
'Still Got It, Never Lost It!' is the autobiography from Louie Spence, star of Pineapple Dance Studios and Louie Spence's Showbusiness.
The Train in the Night: A Story of Music and Loss
Nick Coleman - 2012
The Train in the Night is an account of one man's struggle to recover from the loss of his greatest passion in life - and to go one step further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music.Of all our relationships with art, the one we enjoy with music is the most complex, the most mysterious and, for reasons that cannot be explained by science alone, the most emotionally charged. Nothing about that relationship is simple. And yet it is perhaps through music that we make the most intimate contact with our sense of who we really are, at our most naked, unsophisticated, honest, and simplified. Through psalms, symphonies, love songs, ballads, boogie...Where to start, though, for the newly deaf? Well, you can start, suggested a famous neurologist, by trying to remember every beautiful piece of music you've ever heard and then by thinking about that music over and over again until it begins to assume a new kind of form in your brain. You never know what might happen after that. And so that's what the author did. He went back to the origins of his passion - the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe - and then worked his way forwards through the back catalogue.The Train in the Night is a memoir not quite like any other. It is about growing up, obviously. But it is also about becoming young again and trying to see the world for what it is, whether through the eyes of a teenage punk or those of a middle-aged music critic and father of two. It is about taste and love and suffering and delusion. It is about longing to be Keith Richards. It is funny, heartbreaking and, above all, true. It is a hymn to music.
Ozzy: Unauthorized
Sue Crawford - 2002
This biography is a comprehensive study of his past, and with its specially commissioned astrological chart, the future of this survivor and star.
Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training
Adam Stern - 2021
His new and initially intimidating classmates were high achievers from the Ivy League and other elite universities around the nation. Stern pulls back the curtain on the intense and emotionally challenging lessons he and his fellow doctors learned while studying the human condition, and ultimately, the value of connection. The narrative focuses on these residents, their growth as doctors, and the life choices they make as they try to survive their grueling four-year residency. Most importantly, as they study how to help distressed patients in search of a better life, they discover the meaning of failure and the preciousness of success.
Seeking Jordan: How I Learned the Truth about Death and the Invisible Universe
Matthew McKay - 2016
The murder of Matthew McKay’s son, Jordan, sent him on a journey in search of ways to communicate with his son despite fears and uncertainty. Here he recounts his efforts — including past-life and between-lives hypnotic regressions, a technique called induced after-death communication, channeled writing, and more.McKay, a psychologist and researcher, ultimately learned how to reach his son. In this book he provides extraordinary revelations — direct from Jordan — about the soul’s life after death, how karma works, why we incarnate, why there is so much pain in the world, the single force that connects us, and our future as souls. Unlike many books about after-death communication, near-death experiences, and past-life memories, this is a book for those who do not believe yet yearn to know what happens after death. In addition to being riveting reading, Seeking Jordan is a unique heart-, soul-, and mind-stirring reflection on the issues each of us will ultimately face.
The Finest Traditions of My Calling: One Physician’s Search for the Renewal of Medicine
Abraham M. Nussbaum - 2016
We live in an era of continuous healthcare reforms, many of which focus on high volume, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This compelling, thoughtful book is the response of a practicing psychiatrist who explains how population-based reforms have diminished the relationship between doctors and patients, to the detriment of both. As an antidote to failed reforms and an alternative to stubbornly held traditions, Dr. Abraham M. Nussbaum suggests ways that doctors and patients can learn what it means to be ill and to seek medical assistance. Using a variety of riveting stories from his own and others’ experiences, the author develops a series of metaphors to explore a doctor’s role in different healthcare reform scenarios: scientist, technician, author, gardener, teacher, servant, and witness. Each role influences what a physician sees when examining a person as a patient. Dr. Nussbaum cautions that true healthcare reform can happen only when those who practice medicine can see, and be seen by, their patients as fellow creatures. His memoir makes a hopeful appeal for change, and his insights reveal the direction that change must take.
Booky Wook Collection
Russell Brand - 2014
The bloke can write. He rhapsodizes about heroin better than anyone since Jim Carroll. With the flick of his enviable pen, he can summarize childhood thus: ‘My very first utterance in life was not a single word, but a sentence. It was, ‘Don’t do that.’... Russell Brand has a compelling story." — New York Times Book ReviewThe gleeful and candid New York Times bestselling autobiography of addiction, recovery, and rise to fame from Russell Brand, star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and one of the biggest personalities in comedy today.Picking up where he left off in My Booky Wook, movie star and comedian Russell Brand details his rapid climb to fame and fortune in a shockingly candid, resolutely funny, and unbelievably electrifying tell-all: Booky Wook 2. Brand’s performances in Arthur, Get Him to the Greek, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall have earned him a place in fans’ hearts; now, with a drop of Chelsea Handler’s Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, a dash of Tommy Lee’s Dirt, and a spoonful of Nikki Sixx’s The Heroin Diaries, Brand goes all the way—exposing the mad genius behind the audacious comic we all know (or think we know) and love (or at least, lust).
Tender is the Scalpel's Edge: Stories from the Journal of an NHS Consultant Surgeon
Gautam Das - 2016
What is it like to be the senior surgeon when a young woman is brought to casualty with a life-threatening bleed? What does the fear of cancer do to a person? Is it ever best not to tell the patient everything? Tender is the Scalpel’s Edge draws on Gautam Das’s real-life experiences working in Britain’s busy NHS hospitals, from the plunging depths of a patient dying on the operating table to the euphoria of a life saved by teamwork and skill. Described in exquisite detail and with extreme sensitivity, Gautam shares his journey from a medical student fighting his own inner demons to a senior NHS consultant surgeon. Shards of his earlier life in India add to the richness of the narrative in tales that observe life with all its contradictions, like the little village boy with bone cancer. While other anecdotes take in the lighter side of life, Tender is the Scalpel’s Edge is written to inform and engross the general reader, as well as those with a curiosity of life behind the surgeon’s mask. Written in a manner similar to other medical biographies including Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, Tender is the Scalpel’s Edge is a moving collection of true stories from a professional at the frontline of medical care.
Trauma: My Life as an Emergency Surgeon
James Cole - 2011
Cole's harrowing account of his life spent in the ER and on the battlegrounds, fighting to save lives. In addition to his gripping stories of treating victims of gunshot wounds, stabbings, attempted suicides, flesh-eating bacteria, car crashes, industrial accidents, murder, and war, the book also covers the years during Cole's residency training when he was faced with 120-hour work weeks, excessive sleep deprivation, and the pressures of having to manage people dying of traumatic injury, often with little support.Unlike the authors of other medical memoirs, Cole trained to be a surgeon in the military and served as a physician member of a Marine Corps reconnaissance unit, United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and on a Navy Reserve SEAL team. From treating war casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq to his experiences as a civilian trauma surgeon treating alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals, and the mentally deranged, TRAUMA is an intense look at one man's commitment to his country and to those most desperately in need of aid.