Memoir Industry

The Gap is a vivid portrait of the lead-up to Christmas; an unflinching, no-holds-barred look at what happens after the triple-zero call is made - the drugs, nightclubs, brothels, drunk rich kids, billionaires, domestic disputes, the elderly, emergency births, even a kidnapping. Patients share their innermost feelings, and we witness their loneliness, their despair and their hopes.

On October 5, 2017, the New York Times published an article by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that helped change the world. For months Kantor and Twohey had been having confidential discussions with top actresses, former Weinstein employees and other sources, learning of disturbing, long-buried allegations. The journalists meticulously picked their way through a web of decades-old secret payouts and nondisclosure agreements, pressed some of the most famous women in the world to risk going on the record.

When her daughter desperately needed a lung transplant to survive, Janet Murnaghan rallied against the outdated restrictions in health care that would limit her daughter's options. Transplant laws, restricting access to lungs based on arbitrary age restrictions, meant Sarah's options were limited. The injustice of her daughter's fate spurred Janet to start a public battle against outdated health-care regulations and a battle to save Sarah's life.

It’s an age-old question: Why do some great ideas or inventions take off and soar while others never get off the ground? Today, with more and more young entrepreneurs seeking to incorporate social justice, economic equity, climate concerns, and communal health into their endeavors, the need for practical-yet-think-big answers is great. Thibault Manekin has a few.

Dueling milkmen, a parrot with Tourette syndrome, and a Kool-Aid stand that would have made Hugh Hefner proud. Family camping trips out of a big hairy trailer. A reluctant altar boy and a Gestapo priest, birth control haircuts, the Grit and the Groundhog. A lifelong voyage of discovering how to extricate one's head from one's ass. This is Book I of the Assman Chronicles; a semi-autobiographical montage of anecdotes and observations about Dick Assman growing up and teaching in Appalachian southeastern Ohio in the 1960s and 70s.

Dreams from My Mother is an inspiring story about childhood, race, identity, family, friendship, hope and what makes us who we are. Ultimately, it is an incredibly moving story of a mother and a daughter separated by society, but united in the dreams they shared for her future.

In Germany on Christmas Day 1956 a baby girl was born without ears. She was the first victim of the notorious thalidomide epidemic. There would be over 10,000 more across 46 countries. For years the world believed the United States had avoided the catastrophe. After Frances Kelsey at the FDA became suspicious of the dangers of thalidomide in 1960, she led a successful fight to block its commercial approval. But now, having probed government and corporate archives and interviewed hundreds of key players, Jennifer Vanderbes reveals a darker truth that lay buried for decades.

For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. The Royal Art of Poison is a hugely entertaining work of popular history that traces the use of poison as a political - and cosmetic - tool in the royal courts of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the Kremlin today.

Go behind the scenes of popular music festivals with the medical professionals who risk it all to keep everyone safe. From intoxicated teens to patients in porta-potties, discover the hidden, often hilarious, side of music festivals from the points of view of dedicated EMTs and paramedics. Written by lawyer-turned-paramedic Jim Bollenbacher, this lighthearted collection of stories provides an inside view of the world of music festival medicine.

As one of America’s most celebrated vascular surgeons, Dr. Frank Veith’s career was anything but conventional—from working undercover with the CIA to fighting to make vascular surgery an independent specialty to creating the largest vascular conference in the world.

In 1987, 20-year-old Nicki Chapman wasn't meant to be walking through the seedy but sublime Soho streets towards MCA records; she was supposed to be living it up in the much sunnier climes of Australia. But fate, as it turned out, had much louder plans for her...Everyone knows that in the 90s and 00s there were king-makers in pop music, namely Simon Fuller and Simon Cowell. But this is the story of the queen - who wasn't so much a marionette pulling strings as a down-to-earth, no-nonsense team player who made it in the music industry when it was very much a man's world.

Still MD is an abbreviated form of the phrase "still a medical doctor". This audiobook affirms the crucial role of international medical graduates (IMGs) in the United States healthcare system. This book was authored by two international medical graduates Dr. Nina Lum and Dr. Kimberly Brown, who are now thriving in clinical practice. In Still MD, the doctors reveal tried and proven tips for success for each milestone required to grow from being an international medical student to becoming a practicing physician in the United States.

Stanley Aylett's remarkable account of six years' service as a front-line surgeon with the British Army is that rare thing: a complete narrative from the first week of the Second World War until months after the final capitulation of Nazi Germany. That war was the last Western conflict in which military surgeons performed operations immediately behind the front line, often in makeshift theatres set up in tents or abandoned, battle-scarred buildings. Surgeon at War records the resilience and resourcefulness of the medical teams.

Senator John McCain once decried mixed martial arts as "human cockfighting," while the New York Times despaired that the sport offered a "pay-per-view prism" onto the decline of western civilization. But the violent spectacle of cage fighting no longer feels nearly as scandalous as it did when the sport debuted in 1993.

Lysa has been a paramedic for over 20 years, working for the London Ambulance service - the world's biggest and busiest free service - for much of that time. Here, she reveals what it's really like to work in a job that brings paramedic teams face-to-face with death - and destiny - every day.

It’s the business of saving lives. Miracle Medicines goes behind the scenes of the pharmaceutical industry and into the high-security laboratories to tell the stories of the men and women - chemists, physiologists, medical and clinical researchers, engineers - who have chosen to toil for years in the lab in order to transform scientific theories into new lifesaving medicines. You’ll witness the day-to-day labors, victories and defeats of the dedicated professionals who are waging a war against the diseases that still plague mankind.

From Ethiopia to Sierra Leone, Tanzania to Togo, Dr Andrew Browning has been helping women affected by obstetric fistulas - a debilitating condition resulting from obstructed childbirth - for nearly two decades. Andrew began his African career in the 1990s working with the late Dr Catherine Hamlin and since then has started the Barbara May Foundation, which has built hospitals, trained staff and established programs to heal fistulas and also prevent them from occurring around Africa in the world's most disadvantaged women.

In Kidney to Share, Martha Gershun tells the story of her decision to donate a kidney to a stranger. She takes listeners through the complex process by which such donors are vetted to ensure that they are physically and psychologically fit to take the risk of a major operation. Gershun and Lantos analyze the differences that arise depending on whether the organ comes from a living donor or one who has died. They observe the expertise and the shortcomings of doctors, nurses, and other professionals and describe the burdens that we place on people who are willing to donate.

First as a music writer and then as an editor, promoter, manager, broadcaster, publicist and author, Stuart Coupe has experienced the giddy highs and crushing lows of a life lived in the creative fast lane. Shake Some Action is your backstage pass to his remarkable story, from starting his first magazine at the age of fourteen to hoovering heroic amounts of cocaine before interviewing Boy Dylan (who asked him where he got his drugs from).

This anthology brings together inspiring stories from nurses across various specialties showcasing their resilience and dedication that fuels their noble profession. Each wrote a chapter of their challenges in nursing and why they never let these challenges make them quit. And encouraging words for the next generation of nurses. You will be amazed at the struggles of these nurses and how their passion for the profession kept them going.