National Book Award winner Jonathan Kozol is best known for his fifty years of work among our nation’s poorest and most vulnerable children. Now, in the most personal book of his career, he tells the story of his father’s life and work as a nationally noted specialist in disorders of the brain and his astonishing ability, at the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, to explain the causes of his sickness and then to narrate, step-by-step, his slow descent into dementia. Dr. Harry Kozol was born in Boston in 1906. Classically trained at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, he was an unusually intuitive clinician with a special gift for diagnosing interwoven elements of neurological and psychiatric illnesses in highly complicated and creative people. “One of the most intense relationships of his career,” his son recalls, “was with Eugene O’Neill, who moved to Boston in the last years of his life so my father could examine him and talk with him almost every day.” At a later stage in his career, he evaluated criminal defendants including Patricia Hearst and the Boston Strangler, Albert H. DeSalvo, who described to him in detail what was going through his mind while he was killing thirteen women. But The Theft of Memory is not primarily about a doctor’s public life. The heart of the book lies in the bond between a father and his son and the ways that bond intensified even as Harry’s verbal skills and cogency progressively abandoned him. “Somehow,” the author says, “all those hours that we spent trying to fathom something that he wanted to express, or summon up a vivid piece of seemingly lost memory that still brought a smile to his eyes, left me with a deeper sense of intimate connection with my father than I’d ever felt before.” Lyrical and stirring, The Theft of Memory is at once a tender tribute to a father from his son and a richly colored portrait of a devoted doctor who lived more than a century.

The American body is in trouble. Unprecedented numbers of us suffer from obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other debilitating illnesses. The root cause is a once-revolutionary idea that seemed to offer so much promise, but instead has become the cause of a global health crisis: processed foods. Over the past seventy-five years, a number of factors aligned to create a reality in which processed carbohydrates became our main food source. In Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs, bestselling author and former FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler explains how the quest to feed a nation resulted in a population that is increasingly suffering from obesity and chronic disease and offers a solution for changing course. For decades, no one questioned the effects of these processed carbohydrates. The focus was on fertile grassland, ideal for growing vast amounts of wheat and corn; an industrial infrastructure perfect for refining those grains into starch; a food production behemoth that turns refined grains into affordable, appealing, and ever-present food items, from pizza to burritos to bagels; and an efficient distribution network that ensures consumption by Americans nationwide. But during those same decades, our bodies quietly contended with the metabolic chaos caused by consuming rapidly absorbable starch. Slowly but surely, these effects accumulated and became disastrous, leading to the public health crisis in which we find ourselves today. In Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs, Kessler explains how eating refined grains such as wheat, corn, and rice leads to a cascade of hormonal and metabolic issues that make it very easy to gain weight and nearly impossible to lose it. Worse still is how excess weight creates a very real link to diabetes, heart disease, cognitive decline, and a host of cancers. We can no longer afford to dismiss the consequences of eating food that is designed to be rapidly absorbed as sugar in our bodies. Informed by cutting-edge research as well as Dr. Kessler's own personal quest to manage his weight, Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs reveals in illuminating detail how we got to this critical turning point in our health as a nation--and outlines a plan for eliminating heart disease, allowing us to, finally, regain control of our health.

The public usually learns when a celebrity is stricken with a life-threatening illness. But what we don't get to share are the intimate details of their private anguish and personal treatment. In TAKING ON HEART DISEASE, more than a dozen celebrities from the arts, sports, politics, and journalism team up with The Larry King Cardiac Foundation and Spotlight Health to speak candidly and movingly about the battles they have waged with heart disease. In the process, they arm us with the knowledge we need to fight--and eventually win--the war against the nation's #1 killer. Walter Kronkite, Regis Philbin, Joyce Carol Oates, Kate Jackson, Mike Wallace, Peggy Fleming, and Brian Littrell are some of the famous, successful men and women who have agreed to speak so openly in TAKING ON HEART DISEASE. Their private doctors, among the top cardiologists in the nation, explain the important medical implications of each case, providing the most up-to-date scientific information on preventing, treating, and living with a variety of heart ailments. In TAKING ON HEART DISEASE, you will discover: ? An honest discussion of the emotional impact of deadling with heart disease, including the anxiety and depression many heart patients experience after treatment ? A primer on the main risk factors for heart disease--and what you can do to lower your risk ? A surprising look at the spiritual implications of surviving a life-threatening cardiac event

If you thought the time of medical breakthroughs was over, brace yourself for the untold story of a doctor who singlehandedly, in the face of disdain from his colleagues and threats from government bureaucrats, made a breakthrough scientific discovery. Dr. Rader discovered how to apply fetal stem cell technology to humans and has saved the lives and eased the suffering of more than 1,500 patients with Autism, Epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis, Stroke, Parkinson's disease, Muscular Dystrophy, and many other diseases. Blocked in the U.S.A. reveals the science behind Dr. Rader's breakthroughs, the struggles with the medical establishment, and, most important, the detailed successful results of his work. Now the truth can be told, and it reads like an adventure story, spanning three continents as one doctor dared to defy the FDA, the medical establishment and the drug companies.