Alex Brantley is a disgraced surgeon whose desperation to start a new life outside of medicine leads him to settle in a sleepy Texas town close to the Mexican border, a town that has a dark side. Its secrets and his own past catch up with him as traits he thought he'd buried in the deserts on the frontiers of the border rise up again to haunt him. To the citizens of Three Rivers, Henry Wallis appears to be a normal Texas teenager: a lean, quiet kid from a good family whose life seems to center around running cross-country, his first girlfriend, and Friday night football. That Henry is a cultivated illusion, however, a disguise he wears to conceal his demons. Both meticulous and brutally cruel, he manages to hide his sadistic indulgences from the world, but with that success, his impulses grow stronger until one day when a vagrant is found murdered. When Alex and Henry's paths cross, it starts a domino effect which leads to mangled lives and chilling choices made in the shadows along la frontera, where everything is negotiable.
The future of medicine is happening now. Revolutionary new science is providing cures that were considered science fiction just a few years ago—and not with pills, surgery, or radiation, but with human cells. Promising treatments now in extensive clinical trials could have dramatic impacts on cancer, autoimmune diseases, organ replacement, heart disease, and even aging itself. The key to these breakthroughs is the use of living cells as medicine instead of traditional drugs. Discover the advances that are alleviating the effects of strokes, Alzheimer's disease, and even allergies. Cells Are the New Cure takes you into the world of regenerative medicine, which enables doctors to repair injured and aging tissues and even create artificial body parts and organs in the lab. Cellular medicine experts Robin L. Smith, MD, and Max Gomez, PhD, outline the new technologies that make it possible to harness the immune system to fight cancer and reverse autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. CRISPR, a new technology for targeted gene editing, promises to eradicate genetic diseases, allowing us to live longer lives—possibly even beyond age 100 in good health. Cells Are the New Cure takes you on a tour of the most exciting and cutting-edge developments in medicine. The content inside these pages could save your life or the life of someone you love.
A husband and wife race to find a cure for the disease that has inspired a serial killer to terrorize Manhattan in this classic medical thriller from the bestselling author and creator of the hit Netflix drama The Stranger. They’re one of the country’s most telegenic couples: beloved TV journalist Sara Lowell and New York’s hottest basketball star, Michael Silverman. Their family and social connections tie them to the highest echelons of the political, medical, and sports worlds—threads that will tangle them up in one of the most controversial and deadly issues of our time. In a clinic on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a doctor has dedicated his life to eradicating a divisive and devastating disease. One by one, his patients are getting well. One by one, they’re being targeted by a serial killer. And now Michael has been diagnosed with the disease. There’s only one cure, but many ways to die...
Our current theory of cure isn’t working. When did it stop? Today, we can’t cure most diseases. When cured – few can be proven cured. Even the common cold, the flu, and measles. I’ve had them all, cured. Over 99 percent of cases are cured, while medical theory “there is no cure for…” The same is true for many other diseases. We need a theory of cure that encompasses every curable medical condition or disease. This book is the first step on that path. Cure is defined by cause. Every curable medical condition has a present cause that, when addressed, results in a cure. Of course, many diseases are compound and complex, having multiple causes often causing other diseases themselves. There is plenty of complexity. To study cure, we simplify first and then build our understanding from a solid foundation. There are exactly two basic types of illness causes, resulting in exactly two types of cures. An element of illness has a single cause. The cause of an illness might be found in diet, body, mind, spirit, community or environment of the afflicted. The illness element is cured when the cause has been successfully addressed. Once an illness is cured, that cure is permanent. No cure is permanent. If the cause occurs again, a new illness might occur. This logic applies to every cure. Cures are forward movements in life. We can only go forward in life, not backwards. No cure is perfect. Perfect cures are a myth. Real cures are real. Both healing and curing function by addressing the basic causes of illness. Healing cures are unconscious intentional actions that successfully address the cause of an illness. No healing cure is perfect - even when the results are better than before. Curing consists of intentional personal, community, and medical actions that address the cause of an illness. Caring is attention by self and community to address the signs and symptoms of disease, to aid and facilitate healthy tolerance of the signs and symptoms of disease and to aid and facilitate cures.
An astonishing novel about pain, release, and recovery from two-time National Book Award finalist, Patricia McCormick. A tingle arced across my scalp. The floor tipped up at me and my body spiraled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next. Callie cuts herself. Never too deep, never enough to die. But enough to feel the pain. Enough to feel the scream inside. Now she's at Sea Pines, a "residential treatment facility" filled with girls struggling with problems of their own. Callie doesn't want to have anything to do with them. She doesn't want to have anything to do with anyone. She won't even speak. But Callie can only stay silent for so long...
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
Folklore tells us something about almost every aspect of the life of the people. This rich and entertaining collection of Nebraska pioneer folklore, taken largely from the Nebraska Folklore Pamphlets issued by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s, is intended first and foremost for the general reader, for the people whose heritage it is. Songs of trail and prairie and of the Farmers' Alliance, white man's yarns and Indian tales, pioneer Nebraska folk customs, sayings, proverbs, beliefs, children's games, cooking, and cures—these "wondrously entertaining kaleidoscopic reflections of the people and environment that were inspirations of the classic literature of Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather—to name two—could be a model for Americana collectors in other states to emulate. . . . A treasury indeed."—King Features Syndicate "Parade of Books."
A guide for parents whose adult children have cut off contact that reveals the hidden logic of estrangement, explores its cultural causes, and offers practical advice for parents trying to reestablish contact with their adult children. “Finally, here’s a hopeful, comprehensive, and compassionate guide to navigating one of the most painful experiences for parents and their adult children alike.”—Lori Gottlieb, psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Labeled a silent epidemic by a growing number of therapists and researchers, estrangement is one of the most disorienting and painful experiences of a parent's life. Popular opinion typically tells a one-sided story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents. However, the reasons for estrangement are far more complex and varied. As a result of rising rates of individualism, an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness, growing economic insecurity, and a historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth, many parents find themselves forever shut out of the lives of their adult children and grandchildren. As a trusted psychologist whose own daughter cut off contact for several years and eventually reconciled, Dr. Joshua Coleman is uniquely qualified to guide parents in navigating these fraught interactions. He helps to alleviate the ongoing feelings of shame, hurt, guilt, and sorrow that commonly attend these dynamics. By placing estrangement into a cultural context, Dr. Coleman helps parents better understand the mindset of their adult children and teaches them how to implement the strategies for reconciliation and healing that he has seen work in his forty years of practice. Rules of Estrangement gives parents the language and the emotional tools to engage in meaningful conversation with their child, the framework to cultivate a healthy relationship moving forward, and the ability to move on if reconciliation is no longer possible. While estrangement is a complex and tender topic, Dr. Coleman's insightful approach is based on empathy and understanding for both the parent and the adult child.
