The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes surviving the rare stroke to the brain stem that left him with locked-in syndrome. With his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body, he was able to communicate only with his left eye. By turns wistful, mischievous, angry, and witty, Bauby bears witness to his determination to live as fully in his mind as he had been in his body. Again and again he uses his imagination to experience...

"A series of connected personal stories drawn from the author's life and work as an ER doctor that explores how we are all broken--physically, emotionally, and psychically--and what we can do to heal ourselves as we try to heal others"-- Michele Harper is a female, African American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, D.C., in an abusive family, she went to Harvard, where she met...

"A true account of the attack and sinking of the passenger ship SS City of Benares, which was evacuating children from England during WWII"--Provided by publisher. As German bombs rained over England during World War II, British parents by the thousands sent their children out of the country to avoid harm's way. In September 1940, passenger liner SS City of Benares set sail for Canada with one hundred children on board. When the warships escorting...

The author describes her life with autism and how she has used her strong visual sensibility to cope with it.

"If you work hard enough, if you want it enough, if you're smart and talented and "good enough," you can do anything. Except get pregnant. Her whole life, Lucy Knisley wanted to be a mother. But when it was finally the perfect time, conceiving turned out to be harder than anything she'd ever attempted. Fertility problems were followed by miscarriages, and her eventual successful pregnancy plagued by health issues, up to a dramatic, near-death experience...

"In March 1942, at the age of 25, kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger was deported from her hometown in Slovakia along with 998 other young women. They were some of the first Jews to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Very few would survive the next three years until liberation. The SS soon discovered that by putting prisoners in day-to-day charge of the accommodation blocks and even the camps at large-- so called Blockalteste and Lageralteste...

"Sara was at the tender age of 12 when she found the skeleton in her prudish parents' closet: a series of novelty sex books crammed high up on a shelf in her childhood living room, all written by Sara's ordinary suburban dad, Ira. For decades the books were an unspoken secret in Sara's family until Ira developed early onset Alzheimer's disease...and announced he'd be reviving his novelty porn career. With Sara's help. In this cringe-worthy, unique,...

A shy, small-town girl from Kiln, Mississippi, Deanna is the wife of Brett Favre, the NFL's only three-time MVP. She shared in a football player's many problems, from injury to painkiller abuse, but in October 2004, her younger brother was killed in an ATV accident. Then, four days later--still reeling from the loss--Deanna was diagnosed with breast cancer. In this candid and inspirational memoir, she shares the triumphs and the tragedies of a life...

A physician stranded at the South Pole describes how she discovered a lump in her breast, treated herself with a biopsy and chemotherapy, and was rescued by the Air National Guard, and reflects on her experiences and her colleagues. The Antarctic winter, with temperatures 100 below zero, shuts supply lines down completely; conditions are too treacherous for planes or boats and the only connection with the rest of the world is satellite hook-up. During...

This graphic memoir by a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning offers a deeply personal meditation on the "the talk" parents must have with Black children about racism and the brutality that often accompanies it, a ritual attempt to keep kids safe and prepare them for a world that - to paraphrase Toni Morrison - does not love them. Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn't play with a white friend's realistic...