Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming the dangers of childbirth, injury, and disease from harrowing to manageable. But when it comes to the inescapable realities of aging and death, what medicine can do often runs counter to what it should.
Through eye-opening research and gripping stories of his own patients and family, Atul Gawande reveals the suffering this dynamic has produced. Nursing homes, devoted above all to safety, battle with residents over the food they can eat and the choices they are allowed to make. Doctors, uncomfortable discussing patients’ anxieties about death, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.
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When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood—she’d never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life.
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Top Ten Book of 2015 in the Wall Street Journal, and Winner of the Midwest Book Awards and the Langum Prize for Historical Fiction
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Cape Ann, comes a novel of friendship, survival, and the sustaining bonds between a reader and her most beloved author.
In Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, Faith Sullivan returns to Harvester, Minnesota—the setting of her bestseller The Cape Ann—to tell the story of Nell Stillman, an ordinary woman with an extraordinary life.
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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Architect
Could you do the wrong things if you had the right reasons?
When architect John Cross’s son racks up a dangerous gambling debt to the wrong gang, Cross finds himself far away from gilded upper-crust parlors. Deep in the world of desperation and deception, Cross must use his inside knowledge of high-society mansions and museums to craft a robbery even the smartest detectives can’t solve.
With a newfound talent for sniffing out vulnerable—and lucrative—targets, Cross becomes invaluable to the gang.
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For fans of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time comes this landmark novel about autism, memory, and, ultimately, redemption.
Sent to a “therapeutic community” for autism at the age of eleven, Todd Aaron, now in his fifties, is the “Old Fox” of Payton LivingCenter. A joyous man who rereads the encyclopedia compulsively, he is unnerved by the sudden arrivals of a menacing new staffer and a disruptive, brain-injured roommate. His equilibrium is further worsened by Martine, a one-eyed new resident who has romantic intentions and convinces him to go off his meds to feel “normal”
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From the acclaimed author of The Bones of
You comes a haunting and heartbreaking new
psychological thriller that is both a masterpiece of
suspense and a powerful rumination on lost love.
“I was fourteen when I fell in love with a goddess…”
So begins the testimony of Noah Calaway, an
ex-lawyer with a sideline in armchair criminal
psychology. Now living an aimless life in an
inherited cottage in the English countryside, Noah is haunted by the
memory of the beguiling young woman who left him at the altar sixteen
years earlier.
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