Biography & Autobiography : Medical

Shortly after her thirty-seventh birthday, Wall Street Journal reporter and editor Laura Landro was told that she had chronic myelogenous leukemia. Survivor is the remarkable account of her battle against this devastating, potentially fatal cancer - and her successful struggle to take control of her own case. At first almost paralyzed with fear when diagnosed with this form of blood cancer, Laura Landro resolved to use her journalistic training to seek out the treatment that would give her the best shot at surviving. more...

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In this marvelously researched and moving biography closely grounded in Frieda Fromm-Reichmann's work, Gail Hornstein brings back to life the maverick psychiatrist who accomplished what Freud and almost everyone else thought impossible: successfully treating schizophrenics and other seriously disturbed mental patients with intensive psychotherapy, not lobotomy, shock treatment, or drugs. more...

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In Losing My Mind, DeBaggio laid bare his faltering mind in a lovely, poignant meditation on the centrality of memory to human life. In When It Gets Dark, he further charts the progress of both his disease and his emotional and intellectual responses to it. Now, in addition to his loss of memory, DeBaggio confronts the ultimate loss: that of life. DeBaggio deftly describes the frustration, grief, and terror of grappling with his deteriorating faculties. Even more affecting, the prose itself masterfully represents the mental vicissitudes of his disease--DeBaggio's fragments of memory, observation, and rumination surface and subside in the reader's experience much as they operate in his own mind. The narrative weaves these fragments into a fluid and vivid portrayal of life and loss by virtue of his frank, lilting voice and generous sense of wonder at the world around him. Over the course of the book, DeBaggio revisits many of the people, places, and events of his life, both in his memory and in fact. In a sense, he is saying goodbye, paying his respects to the world as it increasingly moves beyond his grasp. It is a poignant irony that as the world recedes from him, he is working at the height of his considerable descriptive powers. In his moments of clarity, his love for the details of his life seems only to become richer and deeper: the limestone creek where he fished for years; his lonely and satisfying herb gardening days; the goldfish pond his son designed and built in his backyard because DeBaggio has a passion for "any hole in the ground with some liquid in it;" his 30 years in the same beloved home in Arlington, Virginia; his early career as a muckraker; the innumerable precious moments spent with his wife and son; his belated grief over his parents' deaths. Adeptly navigating between sorrow and joy, fear and courage, confusion and clarity, DeBaggio delivers a stunning, inspiring portrait of life with Alzheimer's Disease. Bolstered by more...

Price: $17.99