The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing

Healing Hearts: A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon

Kathy Magliato · 261 pages

An inspiring, surprising, and deeply informative memoir of the high-stakes life of a female heart surgeon.

The Right to Be Cold

Sheila Watt-Cloutier · 352 pages

A "courageous and revelatory memoir" (Naomi Klein) chronicling the life of the leading Indigenous climate change, cultural, and human rights advocate. For the first ten years of her life, Sheila Watt-Cloutier traveled only by dog team. Today there are more snow machines than dogs in her native Nunavik, a region that is part of the homeland of the Inuit in Canada. In Inuktitut, the language of I

Ice Bound: One Woman's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole

Jerri Nielsen, Maryanne Vollers · 362 pages

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

They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School

Bev Sellars · 256 pages

Like Native children forced by law to attend schools across Canada and the United States, Sellars and other students of St. Joseph's Mission were allowed home only for two months in the summer and for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the year they lived, worked, and studied at the school. St. Joseph's mission is the site of the controversial and well-publicized sex-related offences of Bishop Hu

On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency

Emily R. Transue · 249 pages

The story of a medical resident's initiation into her first three years as a doctor follows her internship in a Seattle hospital, where she experiences first-hand the triumphs and challenges of rescuing and losing patients.

Lakota Woman

Mary Crow Dog, Richard Erdoes · 263 pages

A unique autobiography unparalleled in American Indian literature, and a deeply moving account of a woman's triumphant struggle to survive in a hostile world. This is the powerful autobiography of Mary Brave Bird, who grew up in the misery of a South Dakota reservation. Rebelling against the violence and hopelessness of reservation life, she joined the tribal pride movement in an effort to bring a

The Reason You Walk

Wab Kinew · 273 pages

When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who'd raised him. Born to an Anishinaabe father and a non-native mother, he has a foot in both cultures. He is a Sundancer, an academic, a former rapper, a hereditary chief, and an urban activist. Kinew writes af

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan · 288 pages

The book narrates Cahalan's issues with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and the process by which she was diagnosed with this form of encephalitis. She wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the events of the previous month, during which time she would have violent episodes and delusions. Her eventual diagnosis is made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several theories s

Direct Red: A Surgeon's View of Her Life-or-Death Profession

Gabriel Weston · 205 pages

I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

Rigoberta Menchu · 251 pages

Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means

Russell Means, Marvin J. Wolf · 573 pages

Up Ghost River: A Chief's Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History

Edmund Metatawabin, Alexandra Shimo · 316 pages

In the 1950s, 7-year-old Edmund Metatawabin was separated from his family and placed in one of Canada's worst residential schools. St. Anne's, in northernn Ontario, is an institution now notorious for the range of punishments that staff and teachers inflicted on students. Years later, in seeking healing, Metatawabin participated in native cultural training workshops that emphasize the holistic app

American Indian Stories

Zitkala-Sa · 104 pages

Collection of American Indian stories by Zitkala-Sa, an Sioux Indian. Many of the stories are of an autobiographical nature.

Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman: 90,000 Lives Changed

Hawa Abdi · 246 pages

"The ... memoir of one brave woman who, along with her daughters, has kept tens of thousands of her fellow Somali citizens safe, healthy, and educated for more than twenty years"--Dust jacket flap.

The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir

Joseph Auguste Merasty, David Carpenter · 120 pages

From publisher: Now a retired fisherman and trapper, Merasty was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of 'aggressive assimiliation.' As Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt to mold children in the ways of white society. They we

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi · 256 pages

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve me

The Broken Cord

Michael Dorris · 300 pages

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Kay Redfield Jamison · 223 pages

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating

One Native Life

Richard Wagamese · 264 pages

"One Native Life is a look back down the road Wagamese has travelled. It's about the things he's learned as a human being, a man and an Ojibway in his fifty-two years on the planet. Whether he's writing about making bannock, playing baseball, listening to the wind, meeting Johnny Cash or running away with the circus, these are stories told in a healing spirit. This is a book about roots: uncoverin

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation

Sandeep Jauhar · 320 pages

Intern is Dr. Sandeep Jauhar's story of his days and nights in residency at a busy hospital in New York City, a trial that led him to question his every assumption about medical care today. Residency―and especially its first year, the internship―is legendary for its brutality, and Jauhar's experience was even more harrowing than most. He switched from physics to medicine in order to follow a mo

The Hospital by the River

Catherine Hamlin, John Little · 320 pages

Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home

Jessica Fechtor · 279 pages

" M.F.K. Fisher meets Brain on Fire in this exquisite memoir of a 28-year-old food blogger who cooks her way back to health after a near-fatal aneurysm Jessica Fechtor was on top of the world: a Harvard graduate student, happily married, and thinking about starting a family. Then, while attending an academic conference, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. Multiple surgeries left

What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir

Alice Eve Cohen · 194 pages

A personal and medical odyssey beyond anything most women would believe possibleAt age forty-four, Alice Eve Cohen was happy for the first time in years. After a difficult divorce, she was engaged to an inspiring man, joyfully raising her adopted daughter, and her career was blossoming. Alice tells her fiance that shes never been happier. And then the stomach pains begin. In her unflinchingly hone

Yes Sister, No Sister: My Life as a Trainee Nurse in 1950s Yorkshire

Jennifer Craig · 251 pages

Based on the author's own experiences, this is the fascinating story of one young nurse who enters training in 1952 and eventually progresses to become ward sister.