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At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the...

To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century.

"Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for...

Fifty-year-old Alice Howland, a Harvard professor of cognitive psychology, is at the top of her game. Her kids are grown, her marriage secure, her career on fire, when after mere months of forgetfulness she finds herself in the rapidly downward spiral of early onset Alzheimer's disease. With no cure or treatment, Alice struggles to find meaning and purpose in her everyday life as her concept of self slips away. Without memory or hope, she is forced...

The powerful debut novel from Alan Brennert, Moloka'i tells the story of Rachel Kalama, a seven-year-old Hawaiian girl who contracts leprosy and is quarantined on the island of Moloka'i during the 1890s. Separated from her family and forced to grow up in the leper colony of Kalaupapa, Rachel experiences intense isolation. But she remains strong, finding moments of joy, and even love. Rich in Hawaiian history, this novel proves itself a stellar piece...

An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering. A few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, Jaouad received a diagnosis of leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling...

"It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans. Their reunion sets her own life down a startling path. Vivid, tender, darkly funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the...

In a private clinic Barco and Benigno strike up a friendship while caring for comatose women.

"It all ends with a bang! In the final episodes, Emmy winners Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul bring the saga of Breaking Bad to a bloody conclusion in their roles as meth kingpin, Walter White and his guilt-ridden partner, Jesse Pinkman. As each tries to get clear of the wreckage they left behind in the meth world, DEA agent Hank Schrader's obsessive pursuit of "Heisenberg" gains steam, leading up to a shattering finale that will leave no one in Walt's...

After twenty-five years together, the members of a world-renowned string quartet learn that their beloved cellist may soon be forced to retire. Competing egos, harbored resentment, and irrepressible lust threaten to derail the group as they struggle to maintain harmony in their music and their lives.