She Danced with Lightning


Book Description

Eleven-year-old Anna has lived all her life with severe epilepsy. Despite the ravage of thousands of violent seizures and heavy medications, she has thrived at school, athletics, and her greatest passion—dance. As she approaches her twelfth birthday, Anna’s condition takes a dire turn. Her health declines quickly and a new diagnosis is revealed, leaving the family only one excruciating choice. A parent’s memoir about the medical mysteries of epilepsy and the personal suffering of raising a child with a deadly health condition, She Danced with Lightning is told from the perspective of Anna’s dream-chasing father, who comes to learn from her a strength and courage he never imagined possible.




Lightning Flowers


Book Description

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.




Ring of Lightning


Book Description

As Rhomatum is plagued by political unrest and threatened by enemy city-states, three brothers--heirs to the ruling Rhomandi family, yet torn apart by jealousy, mistrust and political polarization--must overcome their personal differences in order to overthrow the cruel reign of their aged great-aunt who controls the Leythium Rings that mean life for all.




A Mind Unraveled


Book Description

The compelling story of an acclaimed journalist and New York Times bestselling author’s ongoing struggle with epilepsy—how, through personal resilience and the support of loved ones, he overcame medical incompetence and institutional discrimination to achieve once unthinkable success. With a new afterword • “REMARKABLE . . . inspirational in the true sense of the word.”—The New York Times Book Review This is the story of one man’s battle to pursue his dreams despite an often incapacitating brain disorder. From his early experiences of fear and denial to his exasperating search for treatment, Kurt Eichenwald provides a deeply candid account of his years facing this misunderstood and often stigmatized condition. He details his encounters with the doctors whose negligence could have killed him, but for the heroic actions of a brilliant neurologist and the family and friends who fought for him. Ultimately, A Mind Unraveled is an inspirational story, one that chronicles how Eichenwald, faced often with his own mortality, transformed trauma into a guide for reaching the future he desired. Praise for A Mind Unraveled “An intimate journey . . . bravely illuminating the trials of living inside a body always poised to betray itself.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Poignant and infuriating . . . merges elements of medical drama, anti-discrimination fable, and coming-of-age memoir.”—The New Yorker “One of the best thrillers I’ve read in years, yet there are no detectives, no corpses, no guns or knives.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune “Terrific . . . Eichenwald’s narrative is a suspenseful medical thriller about a condition that makes everyday life a mine field, a fierce indictment of a callous medical establishment, and an against-the-odds recovery saga.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Riveting . . . Eichenwald has created a universal tale of resilience wrapped in a primal scream against the far-too-savage world."—Booklist (starred review) “An extraordinary book.”—Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., New York Times bestselling author of The Dance of Anger




Unsolaced


Book Description

From the author of the enduring classic The Solace of Open Spaces, here is a wondrous meditation on how water, light, wind, mountain, bird, and horse have shaped her life and her understanding of a world besieged by a climate crisis. Amid species extinctions and disintegrating ice sheets, this stunning collection of memories, observations, and narratives is acute and lyrical, Whitmanesque in breadth, and as elegant as a Japanese teahouse. “Sentience and sunderance,” Ehrlich writes. “How we know what we know, who teaches us, how easy it is to lose it all.” As if to stave off impending loss, she embarks on strenuous adventures to Greenland, Africa, Kosovo, Japan, and an uninhabited Alaskan island, always returning to her simple Wyoming cabin at the foot of the mountains and the trail that leads into the heart of them.




She Danced


Book Description




Dancing with My Father


Book Description

A daughter's remembrance of life with the eccentric genius and artist Walter Anderson




Dancing in the Streets


Book Description

From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports. Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future. "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation




The Sacred Disease


Book Description

Young Kristin Seaborg had the world at her fingertips: a loving family, happiness and security, early admission to medical school--until the frightening diagnosis of epilepsy threatened to destroy both her career path and her health. Living in constant fear that her seizures would intensify and prevent her from practicing medicine, Kristin kept her condition a closely guarded secret, leading a tenuous double life as patient and practitioner. A memoir of discovery, acceptance, and hope, The Sacred Disease chronicles Kristin's tenacious fight for a seizure-free life. Remarkably, although Kristin's knowledge and expertise continue to develop as a pediatrician and mother, her experiences as a vulnerable patient provide the most valuable lessons of all.




Vampire Kisses 5: The Coffin Club


Book Description

It's tough for love-struck Raven to imagine what's keeping her nocturnal boyfriend from returning to Dullsville. So there's only one thing to do—find Alexander. Along the way, Raven can't resist the spot where she feels most at home, the Coffin Club. But when she stumbles upon a secret door in the club, she descends into a dim catacomb—to a hidden hangout where the house drink happens to be type A or B. Drawn to one of its shadowy members, Raven suspects she's in over her head. But exploring the covert club is too tempting, even after coming face-to-face with Alexander's trouble-stirring enemy. Can Raven delve further into the Underworld unbeknownst to Alexander—and also solve the mystery of her true love's own secrecy? Ellen Schreiber's sizzling Vampire Kisses series continues with its darkest installment yet.