Kate Whouley is a smart, single woman who faces life head-on. Her mother, Anne, is a strong-minded accidental feminist with a weakness for unreliable men. Their complicated relationship isn’t simplified when Anne exhibits symptoms of organic memory loss. As Kate becomes her mother’s advocate and protector, she will discover that the demon we call Alzheimer’s is also an unlikely teacher—and healer. For anyone who has faced and fought the decline of a parent or loved one, this book will touch your heart, make you smile, and, quite possibly, change the way you think about love, life, and loss.
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In Afterlives of the Saints, Colin Dickey— author of Cranioklepty—presents us with a history of faith as told through some of the strangest stories of the saints. These are saints who murder, saints who gouge out their own eyes and hold them out for inspection, saints who minister to the petty and the bizarre and the maligned. These are saints who, when visited in a contemporary context—as saints in the cities—actually enlarge our concept of faith.
With a lively intellect and fresh insight, Dickey reveals that we can no longer experience the world as did the saints who once walked amongst us.
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What drives a young woman raised in a postwar New York City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and embrace a life of exile in Pakistan? The Convert tells the story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, one of the most trenchant and celebrated voices of Islam’s argument with the West.
A cache of Maryam’s letters to her parents in the archives of the New York Public Library sends acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding) on her own odyssey into the labyrinthine heart of twentieth-century century Islam.
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A provocative and surprising investigation into the ways that profit, personalities, and politics obstruct real progress in the war on cancer—and one doctor’s passionate call to action for change.
As a diagnostic radiologist who has watched patients, friends, and family suffer with and die from cancer and who was deeply affected by the enraged husband of one patient, Dr. Margaret I. Cuomo is inspired to seek out new strategies for waging a smarter war on cancer.
This year, about 1.6 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed and more than 1,500 people will die per day.
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The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure German princess who became one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history. Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into empress of Russia by sheer determination. For thirty-four years, the government, foreign policy, cultural development, and welfare of the Russian people were in her hands. She dealt with domestic rebellion, foreign wars, and the tidal wave of political change and violence churned up by the French Revolution.
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1963, Mexico, Maine. The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on a father’s wages from the Oxford Paper Company. Until the sudden death of Dad, when Mum and the four closely connected Wood girls are set adrift. Funny and to-the-bone moving, When We Were the Kennedys is the story of how this family saves itself, at first by depending on Father Bob, Mum’s youngest brother, a charismatic Catholic priest who feels his new responsibilities deeply. And then, as the nation is shocked by the loss of its handsome Catholic president, the televised grace of Jackie Kennedy—she too a Catholic widow with young children—galvanizes Mum to set off on an unprecedented family road trip to Washington,
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