NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Signal Fires and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets : a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test, an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love. “Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.” — People In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about secrets. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in, a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Dani Shapiro’s memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace—part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are. Inheritance is a devastating and haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision.

"Mitch Albom has done it again with this moving memoir of love and loss. You can't help but fall for Chika. A page-turner that will no doubt become a classic." --Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and The Art of Memoir From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Tuesdays With Morrie comes Mitch Albom's most personal story to date: an intimate and heartwarming memoir about what it means to be a family and the young Haitian orphan whose short life would forever change his heart. Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika's arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, "No one in Haiti can help you with." Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika's boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost. Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed--a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared from death for a grimmer fate: to perform “scientific research” on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the infamous “Angel of Death”: Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named Mengele’s personal research pathologist. Miraculously, he survived to give this terrifying and sobering account.

It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi--a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters--was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy's Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly fearing black magic and the near presence of death. In so doing, Levi offered a starkly beautiful and moving account of a place and a people living outside the boundaries of progress and time.

A vibrant cultural history investigating pandemics and vaccines, by bestselling author and historian Simon Schama Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before. Characteristically, Schama's message is delivered through gripping, page-turning stories set in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: smallpox strikes London; cholera hits Paris; plague comes to India. Threading through the scenes of terror, suffering and hope - in hospitals and prisons, palaces, and slums - are an unforgettable cast of characters: a philosopher-playwright burning up with smallpox in a country chateau; a vaccinating doctor paying house calls in Halifax; a woman doctor in south India driving her inoculator-carriage through the stricken streets as dead monkeys drop from the trees. But we are also in the labs when great, life-saving breakthroughs happen, in Paris, Hong Kong, and Mumbai. At the heart of it all is an unsung hero: Waldemar Haffkine, a gun-toting Jewish student in Odesa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute, hailed in England as "the saviour of mankind" for vaccinating millions against cholera and bubonic plague in British India while being cold-shouldered by the medical establishment of the Raj. Creator of the world's first mass production line of vaccines in Mumbai, he is tragically brought down in an act of shocking injustice. Foreign Bodies crosses borders between east and west, Asia and Europe, the worlds of rich and poor, politics and science. Its thrilling story carries with it the credo of its author on the interconnectedness of humanity and nature; of the powerful and the people. Ultimately, Schama says, as we face the challenges of our times together, "there are no foreigners, only familiars."

Sherwin B. Nuland—best-selling author of How We Die —focuses his surgeon’s eye and writer’s pen on this greatest of rabbis, most intriguing of Jewish philosophers, and most honored of Jewish doctors. Moses Maimonides was a Renaissance man before there was a Renaissance: a great physician, a dazzling Torah scholar, a daring philosopher. Eight hundred years after his death, his notions about God, faith, the afterlife, and the Messiah still stir debate; his life as a physician still inspires; and the enigmas of his character still fascinate. Nuland's portrait of Maimonides that makes his life, his times, and his thought accessible to the general reader as they have never been before.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named a Best Book of the Year by Bloomberg (Chosen by Philip Tetlock), Booklist ’s Top 10 Science Books of the Year, and Shortlisted for Physics World ’s Book of the Year A Major Biography of the Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist, Enrico Fermi, a Leading Architect of the Atomic Age Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world’s physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called “the Pope” by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics. Fleeing Fascism and anti-Semitism, Fermi became a leading figure in America’s most secret project: building the atomic bomb. An examination of the human dramas that touched Fermi’s life as well as a thrilling history of scientific innovation in the twentieth century, this is the comprehensive biography that Fermi deserves.

The spiritual odyssey of a Jewish German medical doctor who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and found Truth where he least expected. First printed in 1951, the book instantly became a best-seller. Now reprinted with a new Introduction.

National book Award laureate; recipient of Special Pulitzer Prize citation; winner of the Life in America Prize the Archives of American Art Award; among many others, James Thomas Flexner has written with distinction about American history and art. He has penetrated many of the charactrers who have shaped history exposing the intricacies of not only the historical figure, but the man beneath the marble image. The range of Flexner's subjects is wide: painters, inventors, doctors, loyalists, traitors, and spies, such luminaries as George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Alexander Hamilton, and John Singleton Copley, are among those Flexner has taken as subjects. After over fifty years of writnig, Flexner, one of America's greatest chroniclers has turned his probing eye back on to the pages of his own life with the same honesty, frankness, wit which have come to signify his form. James Thomas Flexner was born in 1908 on Lexington Avenue, New York City to parents Helen Thomas and Simon Flexner (scientist and first director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical research.) Published in the literary magazine at the Lincoln High School, Flexner's passion for writing was spawned at a young age. This passion would become a source of life long struggle as well as success for Flexner. Journalist for the Herald Tribune, and foremost biographer (as well as making numerous appearances on radio and television,) Flexner's career allowed him access into the quick of the political, social, and artistic movements and developments that shaped the twentieth century. An un-traditional student, Flexner, although graduating magna com laude from Harvard University, often pursued what was to be considered by academics, unorthodox methods of research for his work. Following the passion of his own interests and plotting his own course of research and study, Flexner created of himself a sort of maverick, chartign a course for biography that countered that written in the guide books of academe. While he probed and uncovered the lives of the great men who shaped the past, noteworthy publishers, writers, artists, and politicians of the twentieth century fill the pages of Maverick's Progress. Flexner writes of how influences, acquantances, and friends such as Bernard Berenson, Conrad Aiken, Ivy Lee, Harry Hopkins, Allan Nevins, Logan Pearsall Smith, and Edward Hopper figured in his life, and in his development as a writer. James Flexner has authored more than twenty books, several of them have been recently re-published by Fordham University Press. He was awarded the Gold Medal for Eminence in Biography, by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988. He is perhaps most well known for his four-volume biography of George Washington which was eventually condensed into one: An Indispensable Man from which two television mini-series have been produced and for which he was awared the Peabody Award and Emmy Nomination. Maverick's Progress offers us a candid an sparkling look into the life of a writer who has indeed been a maverick in the canon of American historians - an individual who himself has been an Indispensable Man.

This tale of two families is set on a grand scale, as James Thomas Flexner brings his talents to bear on his own noteworthy heritage. An American Saga is an historical narrative, grounded on documentary sources, which ends with the marriage of Helen Thomas and Simon Flexner. The account deals equally with the lives and the backgrounds of husband and wife, the author's parents. Simon Flexner was the famous medical investigator, discoverer of the "Flexner vacillus" and the "Flexner serum," who became the creating director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University) and eventually acknowledged leader of American medical science. The Kentucky-born son of impoverished German Jewish immigrants, he grew up in penury. As he never completed the eighth grade, he was almost completely self-educated when he appeared at the Johns Hopkins University before its celebrated medical school had been founded. Almost instantly he began making the discoveries that soon made him the leading younger medical scientist in the United States.

Acclaimed journalist Robert Timberg's extraordinary, long-awaited memoir of his struggle to reclaim his life and find his calling after being severely burned as a young Marine lieutenant in Vietnam In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go before he got to go back home to his wife in Southern California. That homecoming would eventually happen, but not in thirteen days, and not as the person he once was. The moment his vehicle struck a Vietcong land mine divided his life into before and after. He survived, barely, with third-degree burns over his face and much of his body. It would have been easy to give up. Instead, Robert Timberg began an arduous and uncertain struggle back--not just to physical recovery, but to a life of meaning. Remarkable as his return to health was--he endured thirty-five operations, one without anesthesia--just as remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist and enter one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis. By the 1980s, Timberg had moved into the upper ranks of his profession, having secured a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard and a job as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun . Suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans, Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. Timberg's coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale's Song , a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows these three academy graduates and two others--John McCain and Jim Webb--from Annapolis through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy , Timberg relates how he came to know and develop a deep understanding of these five men, and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continued to haunt him, and the nation as a whole, as they still do even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion. Like others of his generation, Robert Timberg had to travel an unexpectedly hard and at times bitter road. In facing his own life with the same tools of wisdom, human empathy, and storytelling grit he has always brought to his journalism, he has produced one of the most moving and important memoirs of our time.

Triumph of Hope From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel Now available in English, here is the award-winning and internationally acclaimed testament of a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, where she was forced to confront perhaps the most agonizing choice ever imposed upon any woman, upon any human being . so that both she and her newborn infant should not die in a Nazi ""medical"" experiment personally conducted by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. And just as vividly, Ruth Elias recounts the aftermath of her imprisonment, and the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited. ""One of the most powerful memoirs provided to us by a survivor."" --Indiana Jewish Post and Opinion ""Well-written . not only provides a remarkably honest picture of the unspeakable reality of living in ghettos and slave-labor and death camps, but also what it meant to be Jewish in Europe. in the 1920s and 1930s.. This is one of the best Holocaust memoirs I have read."" --Washington Jewish Week ""The understated tone of this memoir adds to the author's powerful re-creation of her life as a young Czechoslovak Jewish woman during the Holocaust."" --Publishers Weekly

When a powerful mystic steps on the hand of a radical young hippie doctor from Detroit, it changes lives and the world. Sometimes Brilliant chronicles the adventures of a philosopher, seeker, unconventional doctor, groundbreaking tech innovator, and key player in the eradication of one of the worst pandemics in human history. His story--about what happens when love, compassion, and determination meet the right circumstances to effect positive change--is the kind that keeps hope and the sense of possibility alive. After sitting at the feet of Martin Luther King Jr. at the University of Michigan in 1963, Larry Brilliant was swept up into the civil rights movement, marching and protesting across America and Europe. As a radical young doctor, he followed the Hippie Trail from London over the Khyber Pass with his wife Girija, Wavy Gravy, and the Hog Farm commune to India. There, he found himself in a Himalayan ashram wondering whether he had stumbled into a cult. Instead, one of India's greatest spiritual teachers, Neem Karoli Baba, opened Larry's heart and told him his destiny was to work for the World Health Organization to help eradicate deadly smallpox. He never would have believed he'd become a key player in eliminating a ten-thousand-year-old disease that killed more than half a billion people in the twentieth century alone. Brilliant's unlikely trajectory, chronicled in Sometimes Brilliant, has brought him into close proximity with political leaders, spiritual masters, cultural heroes, and titans of technology around the world--from the Grateful Dead to Mikhail Gorbachev, from Ram Dass, the Dalai Lama, Lama Govinda, and Karmapa to Steve Jobs and the founders of Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Microsoft, and eBay, and Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. Anchored by the engrossing account of the heroic efforts of the extraordinary people involved in smallpox eradication in India, this is a riveting and fascinating epidemiological expedition, an honest reckoning of an entire generation, and a deeply moving spiritual memoir. It is a testament to faith, love, service, and what it means to engage with life's most important questions in pursuit of a better, more brilliant existence.

“ Blood Feud rivals A Civil Action for best non-fiction book of the past twenty years.” — John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author of Damage Procrit seemed like a biotech miracle, promising a golden age in medical care. Developed in the 1980s by Amgen and licensed to the pharmaceutical giant, Johnson & Johnson, the drug (AKA Epogen and Aranesp) soon generated billions in annual revenue—and still does. In 2012, world famous cyclist, Olympian, and Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong was banned from professional cycling on doping charges for using EPO (the blanket name for the drugs Procrit and Epogen), resulting in a global controversy about abuse, big pharmaceutical companies, and the lies and inaccuracies concerning performance-enhancing drugs. Mark Duxbury was a J&J salesman who once believed in the blood-booster, setting record sales and winning company awards. Then Duxbury started to learn unsavory truths about Procrit and J&J’s business practices. He was fired and filed a whistleblower suit to warn the public. When Jan Schlichtman ( A Civil Action ) learned of Duxbury’s crusade, he signed on. Now, he’s fighting on behalf of cancer patients and for every American who trusts Big Pharma with his life.

The man in the street would not, perhaps, recognize all the names of the brilliant scientists whose careers and personalities animate this book, but doctors know them. Morgan, who founded the first medical school in American and, fighting beside Washington, was ruined b the petty politics of the Revolution; McDowell, who, although on the fringe of the wilderness, dared the operation that prepared the way for all abdominal surgery; Rush, the equivocal personality who, for better or worse, dominated American medicine for more than fifty years; Beaumont, who, saving a life, won a living laboratory; Drake, who brought modern medicine to the New West; Long and Morton, who banished pain from surgery and earned it for themselves these men are honored in their profession today.

A National Jewish Book Award-winning biography: A look at the early years of Israel's statehood, experienced through the life of a pioneering nurse. During her extraordinary career, nurse Raquela Prywes was a witness to history. She delivered babies in a Holocaust refugee camp and on the Israeli frontier. She crossed minefields to aid injured soldiers in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and organized hospitals to save the lives of those fighting the 1967 Six-Day War. Along the way, her own life was a series of triumphs and tragedies mirroring those of the newly formed Jewish state. Raquela is a moving tribute to a remarkable woman, and an unforgettable chronicle of the birth of Israel through the eyes of those who lived it.

Originally published in 1995, and in the same classic investigative style of Whitewash and Case Open , Harold Weisberg turns his sharp investigative eye towards the events surrounding the autopsy of John F. Kennedy. Inside Never Again! you’ll find: • The specific truths regarding the autopsy of John F. Kennedy—truths that have for thirty years been buried, distorted, or ignored not only by the government but also by the national press • The blatant errors and calculated deceit of the Journal of the American Medical Association in their 1992 reports on the Kennedy autopsy • The path of conspiracy leading from the Navy Hospital in Bethesda through the corridors of the FBI to the Justice Department, into the office of the attorney general and eventually that of the president Weisberg argues this case with exclusive regard for the facts. Facts lead to the book’s startling new illuminations. Facts provide a compelling narrative filled with intrigue and laced with outrage. Facts reveal the failure of America’s institutions to deal effectively with perhaps its most profound national tragedy. In the face of overwhelming facts, Harold Weisberg justly warns us that this must never again happen!

It has been said that the only warriors who do not suffer after combat are those who were killed. I cannot attest to that for all battle tested warriors but I certainly can for one---me. Some years ago a young, 13 year old eighth grade student from the Fairfield, Iowa Middle School once asked me, "Were you wounded in the war? I had been invited to speak in Mrs. Broz's class for many years to talk about my wartime experiences. I had been asked and answered many questions but this one was different. I paused, thought deeply and quickly, and replied. "Yes I was wounded, seriously wounded but not a wound that anyone could see and fix." His question gave me pause to quickly think about warriors in all the wars that have been fought, including mine, whose wounds were unseen, untreated and debilitating even though no blood was shed. I spent a sleepless night wondering if my answer had satisfied him...or me. What was there about my military service that left me so hopeless and so helpless when I returned home to civilian life? Was it me? The military itself? The combat? This is what I recalled; perhaps the answers would come as I wrote my experiences down. "I've been practicing Transcendental Meditation for 40 years. It's a great tool for reducing stress ... especially the stress our men and women of the Armed Forces are going through now." --Clint Eastwood, Academy Award-Winning Film Director "Stress causes, anxiety, depression, and violent behavior. Transcendental Meditation is a remarkable process for reducing stress-it can help people live a long and better life." --Mehemet Oz, MD, America's Doctor "In this riveting memoir, a true American hero describes how Transcendental Meditation changed his life for good. A must-read for those struggling with the aftershocks of combat, and their loved ones." --Norman Rosenthal, M.D. Author of Transcendence: Healing and Transformation Through Meditation "The hidden cost of war includes long-term pain and suffering for may veterans and their families. This wonderful book shows how meditation can be a practical, simple, and effective way for our returning warriors to find peace." --Professor Linda Bilmes, Harvard University, co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War "The Resilient warrior is a riveting read. What is especially impressive is how Jerry Yellin conflates his own war and PTSD experiences, and those experiences of other veterans, with the powerful compelling evidence of the benefits of using meditation as a means to overcome this disorder. I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking relief from stress, regardless of the source of the trauma." --Donald Mikkleson, Vietnam Veteran "My son, Dory, was an eight-year Army veteran who committed suicide early this year and I have suffered terribly. On a really bad day, a few weeks after Dory's death, Jerry Yellin suggested that I read The Resilient Warrior and learn to meditate. Since starting to meditate I can feel the stress leaving me, and my days and nights are getting a little better day-by-day, week-by-week. I strongly recommend Jerry's book to veterans and families of veterans, and anyone who is looking for a way of the nightmare of PTSD." --Lin Klock, Vero Beach, Florida Author Jerry Yellin Jerry was a WW 2 fighter pilot from Hillside, NJ. He flew P-51's over Japan from Iwo Jima. Married to Helene for 60 years, they have four sons and six grandchildren. Jerry is the author of the award winning historical fiction book The Blackened Canteen and his memoir Of War and Weddings . The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." --General Douglas Macarthur

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"I have been a Jew during Fascism, a bourgeois under Communism, a rebel defeated in an uprising, a refugee among the free, and a have-not amid plenty. This book contains over 60 stories that range from my youth in Hungary, the ordeal of a death march and concentration camps, the oppression of the Communist dictatorship, the promise and defeat of the Hungarian Revolution and, finally, my American years"--Preminary pages