Higher Life

With compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again.

Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.

This book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. The story is pretty grim: teen-aged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.

Ever felt like your life is running on a script you didn't write? As if you’re playing a role decided by someone else? You're not alone. The solutions to your problems are within you—in your Inner Child. "Healing Your Wounded Inner Child: A Spiritual Approach" is the definitive guide to reclaiming your life. Unearth the profound impact of your past and how it molds your present. But more importantly, learn how to break free. Inside, you'll discover: The pivotal role your Inner Child plays in your everyday life Methods to heal emotional wounds that have been festering for years Step-by-...

In a world filled with trolls, we all need to live life more like a goblin. What does it mean to "live life like a goblin"? It means to give no f--ks, but also all the f--ks in the world at the same time. It means to be constantly anxiety-ridden while also eternally optimistic. A goblin's heart, specifically John Goblikon's, is filled with love, joy, angst, constant quandary, Chili's Southwestern egg rolls, metal, and empathy. Through goblin eyes, we learn about life, death, business, food, music, travel, culture, dating, school, drinking, compassion, and much more!

The Tudor period conjures up images of queens and noblewomen in elaborate court dress, of palace intrigue and dramatic politics. But if you were a woman, it was also a time when death during childbirth was rife, when marriage was usually a legal contract, not a matter for love, and the education you could hope to receive was minimal at best. Yet the Tudor century was also dominated by powerful and dynamic women in a way that no era had been before.

As she was digging deep into the lives of community members, Heather Lende, the obituary writer for her tiny hometown newspaper in Haines, Alaska, began to notice something. Even the crustiest old Alaskan sourpuss who died in a one-room cabin always had Halloween candy for the neighborhood kids, and the eccentric owner of the seafood store who regularly warned her about government conspiracies knew how to be a true friend - his memorial service was packed.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

Chelsea Chambers is on her own. After a public split from her NFL superstar husband, Chelsea takes a bold step out of the limelight and behind the counter of the Higher Grounds Café, an old-fashioned coffee shop in dire need of reinvention. But when her courage, expert planning, and out-of-this-world cupcakes fail to pay the bills, this newly single mom finds herself desperate for help. Better yet, a miracle.

On the heels of her triumphant How to Be a Victorian, Ruth Goodman travels even further back in English history to the era closest to her heart, the dramatic period from the crowning of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Tudor conditions, Goodman serves as our intrepid guide to 16th-century living. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of those who labored through the era.

Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world's most popular video games, including Sid Meier's Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier's Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry.

This isn’t another book on frugality or risky investing. It’s a real-world plan for middle-income earners stuck with credit cards, student loans, or a mortgage that never seems to end. If you're tired of living paycheck to paycheck and ready to take control, this is for you.

New York Times reporter John Branch's riveting, humane pieces about ordinary people doing extraordinary things at the edges of the sporting world have won nearly every major journalism prize. Sidecountry gathers the best of Branch's work, featuring 20 of his favorites from the more than 2,000 pieces he has published in the paper.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times's most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis....

Atrial fibrillation strikes one in four American adults. Not only do people suffering from this condition suffer from shortness of breath, fatigue, chest discomfort, decreased ability to exercise and do activities of daily living, arrhythmia, and palpitations, but their risk of a stroke, cognitive decline and dementia, heart failure, or premature death also shoots way up. Today, a whole new body of research - one most physicians are unaware of - shows that biomarker and lifestyle optimization may put half the cases of atrial fibrillation into remission without drugs or procedures.

Robert Harland ended his career as a British spy in an Austrian hospital, after being tortured and beaten by Czech security agents in the last days of the communist regime. He was young enough then to find a new life with the Red Cross and then with the UN.

Leading into the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Mayflower, Martyn Whittock examines the lives of the "saints" (members of the Separatist Puritan congregations) and "strangers" (economic migrants) on the original ship. Collectively, these people would become known to history as "the Pilgrims". The story of the Pilgrims has taken on a life of its own as one of our founding national myths - their escape from religious persecution, the dangerous transatlantic journey, that brutal first winter.

The one expert millions of readers have learned to trust, one of the few psychics instantly recognizable to television viewers, Sylvia Browne is back. She has proven herself, in her fifty years of working as a medium, to be the reigning queen of psychic phenomena. Here is an insightful look at how much of one's present life is informed by one's past lives, and how many health and relationship problems have their roots in unresolved past lives.

"It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to die", wrote the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD). He counseled readers to "study death always", and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca's remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James S. Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out.

From sharing a bathroom with 40 strangers to sharing lecture notes, The Naked Roommate is your behind-the-scenes look at everything you need to know about college (but never knew you needed to know). This essential, fully updated edition is packed with real-life advice on everything from making friends to managing stress.