Sociology Memoirs

The Afterlife Confessional follows Bill's journey for answers as he looks through the dizzying kaleidoscope of his clients' lives - the widower who escaped an aged-care trap to take her husband's ashes on the road trip of a lifetime; the man who spent his life paying it forward to try to make up for one shameful act; the closet dominatrix who quietly confronts her husband's infidelity by comforting those truly in need; the devoted couple who insist on going hand-in-hand into the afterlife.

The Cancer Whisperer chronicles Sophie's extraordinary relationship with cancer and the very effective methods she has used for dealing with her fear, anger, denial, and grief. The Brené Brown of cancer, Sophie empowers listeners to reject the traditional adversarial relationship with cancer by teaching us how to listen to it; how to be healed by it as well as how to seek to cure it; and how to be emotionally free even when we are physically curtailed.

After his father died, Leon Wieseltier began to observe the traditional year-long period of mourning, going to the synagogue three times a day to recite the prayer known as the mourner's Kaddish. Struck by the profound, yet unexpected power of this practice and the poverty of his knowledge about it, Leon began to study the history and meaning of this ancient ritual.

In The Good Sport, Kevin White takes an unflinching look at the current state of intercollegiate sports, including the tumultuous changes brought on by the Supreme Court's landmark decision on name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. Drawing on his decades of leadership, White examines the chaos, challenges, and opportunities of this new era—and why he believes the future of college sports hangs in the balance.

A compulsively listenable behind-the-scenes memoir that takes listeners inside the weddings section of The New York Times - the good, bad, and just plain weird - through the eyes of a young reporter just as she's falling in love herself.

Tales of Hardship, Love and Happiness in Tate & Lyle’s East End Factories. On an autumn day in 1944, Ethel Alleyne walked the short distance from her house to Tate & Lyle’s refinery on the shining curve of the Thames. Looking up at the giant gates, Ethel felt like she had been preparing for this moment all her life. She smoothed down her frizzy hair, scraped a bit of dirt off the corner of her shoe and strode through. She was quite unprepared for the sight that met her eyes …

In the Muslim world, sex is permissible (or halal) only within the confines of marriage. Outside of wedlock, the act is considered haram, a sin of the faith. Girls are taught to protect their virginity; their mothers, if not forgoing “the talk” altogether, obscure the facts with elliptical language and metaphors.

In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraines to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain - how we experience, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain.

Dr. Sampson Davis looks at the health-care crisis in the inner city from a rare perspective: as a doctor who works on the front line of emergency medical care in the poor urban neighborhood where he grew up. He also offers practical advice for those living in such communities, where conditions like asthma, heart disease, strokes, obesity, and AIDS are disproportionately endemic. As someone who has struggled with many of the issues troubling his patients, Dr. Davis is able to write with empathy.

Rabbi Dalin explodes the resurrected, widely accepted, yet bankrupt smearing of Pope Pius XII, whom Jewish survivors of the Holocaust considered "a righteous gentile". With devastating scholarship and unblinking honesty, he sets the record straight in an audiobook that should shame haters of the pope, inspire conservative Christians, and sound a warning about the deep roots of Islamofascism.

On Feb. 12, 2008, at E. O. Green Junior High in Oxnard, CA, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed his classmate, Larry King, who had recently begun to call himself "Leticia" and wear makeup and jewelry to school. Profoundly shaken by the news and unsettled by media coverage that sidestepped the issues of gender identity and of race integral to the case, psychologist Ken Corbett traveled to LA to attend the trial.

In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a social media storm. Prominent feminists were outraged at Garner's perceived support for the man involved, but many saw her approach a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamic between men and women.

Little Baghdad is a loving, historical, and personal account of an indigenous group of people who were forced out of their ancestral home, Mesopotamia. They found refuge in the United States, specifically Sterling Heights where according to archaeologists Native Americans lived more than 11,000 years ago. Through her dreamlike poetic travels into homes, museums, and neighborhoods, Weam Namou, author, filmmaker, and journalist tells the story of how this ancient and unique group known as Chaldeans (Neo-Babylonians who still speak a modern form of Aramaic) have survived decades of oppression ...

For two decades, the water in the taps and wells of Mingo County didn’t look, smell, or taste right. Could the water be the root of the health problems - from kidney stones to cancer - in this Appalachian community? Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson certainly thought so. For seven years, Thompson waged an epic legal battle against Massey Energy, West Virginia’s most powerful coal company, helmed by CEO Don Blankenship. Working with fellow lawyers and a crew of young activists, Thompson would uncover the ruthless shortcuts that put the community’s drinking water at risk.

At age 28, Mira Ptacin discovered she was pregnant. Though it was unplanned, she soon embraced the pregnancy and became engaged to Andrew, the father. But five months later, an ultrasound revealed birth defects that would give the child no chance of survival outside the womb. Mira was given three options: terminate her pregnancy, induce early delivery, or wait and inevitably miscarry. Her story is woven together with the story of Mira's mother, who immigrated from Poland (also at the age of 28) and adopted a son, Julian.

This riveting biography of a Massachusetts slave boy who fought in the Revolutionary War illuminates race relations in the Northern colonies, early battles of the revolution, and the experiences of Black soldiers on both sides of the conflict.

Ever wonder why giving anesthesia is described as hours of boredom with moments of panic? With gentle precision, anesthesiologist Wolf Pascoe teases apart an overlooked world and unveils the eggshell dance that takes place at the head of an operating table. Intrigued or spooked by what happens in an operating theatre? Breathing for Two is a seat on the stage, a short book that will change the way you think about life and breath.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

On the evening of July 7, 2016, protesters gathered in cities across the nation after police shot two black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. As officers patrolled a march in Dallas, a young man stepped out of an SUV wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a high-powered rifle. He killed five officers and wounded 11 others. Thompson’s minute-by-minute account includes intimate portrayals of the negotiator, a surgeon who operated on the fallen officers, a mother of four shot down in the street, and the SWAT officers tasked with stopping the gunman.

The remarkable and inspiring story of how London was transformed after the Great Fire of 1666 into the most powerful city in the world, and the men who were responsible for that achievement. Opening in the 1640s, as the city was gripped in tumult leading up to the English Civil War, The Phoenix charts the lives and works of five extraordinary men who would grow up in the chaos of a world turned upside down: the architect, Sir Christopher Wren; gardener and virtuosi, John Evelyn; the scientist, Robert Hooke; the radical philosopher, John Locke; and the builder, Nicholas Barbon.