A candid often comical memoir about finding love and coming to terms with illness, Martin doesn’t shy away from the unflattering bits of looking for your soul mate while also dealing with the complications of MS.

Self-deprecating humor, unflinching depictions of award sexual encounters and unfortunate side effects (the chapter "Shit Happens has some quality toilet humor), this book will make you laugh out loud, which, in my opinion, makes this an exceptional memoir about chronic illness.

Hatch did stellar research to expose how coercive psychiatric treatment—especially tranquilization with heavy antipsychotics—is spreading into nursing homes, child foster care and juvenile facilities, immigration centers, and prisons.

Antipsychotics are becoming a ‘go-to’ approach for institutional management of large populations, especially targeting people of color.

Hatch’s work also draws attention to a vital, related issue: Abundant research shows that involuntary treatment is driven by our culture’s dominant prejudices: classism, racism, sexism, sanism, etc. Predictably then, public discussions of involuntary treatment routinely lack, and desperately need, a greater diversity of voices.

So, while highlighting the work of the Black scholar Hatch, I want to also mention several recent anthologies that bring forth a fantastic diversity of voices and perspectives on contempory psychiatric care, forced treatment, and alternatives: Mad Matters: A Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies; Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, and We've… show more.

For a global perspective on domestic violence, Parson provides a comprehensive look at issues around domestic violence in Chile. She specifically follows the stories of several women and how they navigate through services and systems, facing further violence through the relentless barriers they find themselves up against.

Parson and I both graduated from the Rutgers Anthropology doctoral program and worked under the same advisors—albeit many years apart—and I am grateful to have had her excellent scholarship as a reference for my own. 

Imagine being a medical school student in the best of health and full of spirit and ambition, and suddenly being engulfed by a strange and mysterious illness that even the best of doctors in the most renowned hospitals are unable to appropriately diagnose, let alone treat. This chilling story of a doctor who literally chases his own cure is a great example of the much-needed patient advocacy that may often be required to diagnose and treat rare and complex conditions effectively. The author’s passion for finding the underlying cause of his disease (Castleman’s disease) and experimenting with innovative unlikely combinations of drug therapies makes his story memorable and truly inspiring.

This pregnancy and postpartum guide is compassionate, inclusive, and practical. It’s broken down by stages of the journey, inviting the reader to bounce around to the chapters of pertinence, and covers Rope’s personal experience, contributions from experts, as well as anecdotes from other mothers. Apart from providing critical information, the author’s goal here is to make the reader feel more confident and comfortable with her motherhood experience and to normalize the perfectly healthy responses that are often stigmatized.  

This is the best book I’ve read on the science behind canine nutrition and helping someone's dog live a long and happy life. Rodney Habib and veterinarian Karen Becker create a prescriptive plan that integrates nutritional health sciences through the study of the most long-lived canines. They incorporate environmental principles, stress reduction, and the principles of an overall healthy lifestyle with preeminent science about what nutrients dogs require. They emphasize stress, isolation, and psychological factors, how even exposure to negative energy—insults and mean behavior—can so badly affect dogs and their owners alike.

The authors also dig deep into the subject of what pet food manufacturers don’t want customers to know about. They help the reader get out from the matrix of how we typically feed our canine companions, with information about how standard pet foods are made with the lowest quality ingredients, based on how large corporations do not consider… show more.

I’d like to thank this humorist for making brain surgery fascinating and bizarrely funny.

I couldn’t put it down. I was fascinated with how incredibly dark and awful it was, and yet he made me laugh. 

Normally, I could never read intense, graphic, bloody descriptions of early, risky, experimental brain surgery in the 1930s, when it was a frighteningly new technology. However, the author under the knife was one of the most sarcastic humorists of his time, so the resulting memoir is riveting, thrilling, shocking, horrifying, compelling, and weirdly humorous all the way along. I discovered there are no nerves inside the brain, and you have to be awake during brain surgery.

This writer recorded every scrape, every sound, everything. It is totally horrific, completely amazing, and highly recommended. 

Once again this is about so much more than the incredible physical feat involved in swimming a lap of Great Britain. Ross Edgley is also a student of the world with the smarts and courage to write his own rule book. Once again this is an engaging mix of the deeply personal, science, philosophy, and the humanity of community that has to come together to make extraordinary stuff possible.

I devoured Eben Alexander’s book about a neurologist’s experiences in a coma. It was fascinating, the kind of book that keeps you glued to your seat. A few years ago, I wouldn’t have even considered reading a book with that title. My rational mind wasn’t open to anything beyond what my senses could verify. I dismissed my mystical experiences as coincidences, skeptical of anything that challenged the laws of physics or hinted at mystery.

Though the word "heaven" still doesn’t resonate with me, I’ve begun to sense something unknown. William Blake said, "Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth." My growing awareness of my own mortality has made me more receptive to the unknown.

I no longer demand proof or argue with the unseen. Instead, I listen and allow wonder to rise naturally. Death, once seen as an end, now feels like a threshold into something vast… show more.

I love a good memoir, and this one was a perfect example of the form. Thoughtful, funny, incredibly well-written, and structured, I cared deeply about Lori and her patients. As she weaves together stories from her training as a therapist, her patients, and her work with her own therapist, we see how incredibly damaging life and love are for us—and how those scars themselves make us more beautiful, more worthy of love, more capable of opening our hearts to others.

This does not make the human experience look easy or painless, but it does help me remember what the work is for and how beautiful the pathway can be when we have good company on the way. This book was excellent company for me.