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My Own Country: A Doctor's Story

Abraham Verghese · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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When Crickets Cry

Charles Martin · 376 pages

"It begins on the shaded town square in a sleepy Southern town. A spirited seven-year-old has a brisk business at her lemonade stand. Her latest customer, a bearded stranger, drains his cup and heads for his car, his mind on a boat he's restoring at a nearby lake. But the little girl's pretty yellow dress can't quite hide the ugly scar on her chest. The stranger understands more about it than he w

Chronic IllnessMedicineAmerican SouthEmotional
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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

MedicineChronic IllnessMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures

Anne Fadiman · 341 pages

When three-month-old Lia Lee arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their

MedicineChronic IllnessMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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Mortality

Christopher Hitchens

"Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers"--Provided by the publisher.

Chronic IllnessMedicineMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby · 141 pages

The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes the rare stroke to the brain stem that left his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body.

Chronic IllnessMedicineMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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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

Chronic IllnessMedicineMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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Brother, I'm Dying

Edwidge Danticat · 288 pages

From the age of four, award-winning writer Edwidge Danticat came to think of her uncle Joseph as her "second father," when she was placed in his care after her parents left Haiti for America. And so she was both elated and saddened when, at twelve, she joined her parents and youngest brothers in New York City. As Edwidge made a life in a new country, adjusting to being far away from so many who sh

Immigrant ProtagonistChronic IllnessMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages

MedicineAmerican SouthEmotionalMemoir & Biography
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Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

Padma Lakshmi · 336 pages

Television personality Padma Lakshmi examines "her journey from [a humble family kitchen], led by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges' table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather--a brill

Immigrant ProtagonistChronic IllnessMemoir & BiographyEmotional
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In the Sanctuary of Outcasts

Neil W. White III · 316 pages

Daddy is going to camp. That's what I told my children. A child psychologist suggested it. “Words like prison and jail conjure up dangerous images for children,” she explained. But it wasn't camp...Neil White, a journalist and magazine publisher, wanted the best for those he loved—nice cars, beautiful homes, luxurious clothes. He loaned money to family and friends, gave generously to his church, a

Chronic IllnessMedicineMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Oliver Sacks · 243 pages

In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who

MedicineChronic IllnessEmotionalNonfiction
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Chronic IllnessMemoir & BiographyMedicineNonfiction
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C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too

John Diamond · 240 pages

The witty but compelling story of one man's view of his cancer and its treatment which became an instant bestseller on its publication.Shortly before his 44th birthday, John Diamond received a call from the doctor who had removed a lump from his neck. Having been assured for the previous 2 years that this was a benign cyst, Diamond was told that it was, in fact, cancerous. Suddenly, this man who'd

Chronic IllnessMemoir & BiographyMedicineEmotional
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Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

Henry Marsh · 278 pages

In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to "do no harm" holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh must make agonizing decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty. If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached doctors, thi

MedicineMemoir & BiographyEmotionalNonfiction
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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

Kate Moore · 480 pages

As World War I raged across the globe, hundreds of young women toiled away at the radium-dial factories, where they painted clock faces with a mysterious new substance called radium. Assured by their bosses that the luminous material was safe, the women themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered from head to toe with the glowing dust. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" were conside

MedicineChronic IllnessEmotionalNonfiction
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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · 571 pages

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

MedicineChronic IllnessEmotionalNonfiction
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A Walk to Remember

Nicholas Sparks · 240 pages

There was a time when the world was sweeter....when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats.... Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the s

Chronic IllnessAmerican SouthSmall TownEmotional
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Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness

Tracy Kidder · 304 pages

Tracy Kidder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of the bestsellers The Soul of a New Machine, House, and the enduring classic Mountains Beyond Mountains, has been described by the Baltimore Sun as the "master of the non-fiction narrative." In this new book, Kidder gives us the superb story of a hero for our time. Strength in What Remains is a wonderfully written, inspiring account of one man

Immigrant ProtagonistMedicineEmotionalNonfiction
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The Two Kinds of Decay

Sarah Manguso · 184 pages

"At twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the usual puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with yet another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life, and then, furiously, to expect everything ... Manguso recounts her struggle: blood cleansings, coll

Chronic IllnessMedicineMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story

Frederik Peeters · 192 pages

Chronic IllnessMemoir & BiographyEmotionalNonfiction
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The Second Life of Mirielle West

Amanda Skenandore · 384 pages

Chronic IllnessAmerican SouthMedicineEmotional
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Walking Free

Munjed Al Muderis · 320 pages

MedicineImmigrant ProtagonistMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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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

Chronic IllnessMedicineMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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Stitches

David Small · 336 pages

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award and finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards: the prize-winning children's author depicts a childhood from hell in this searing yet redemptive graphic memoir. One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched toget

MedicineMemoir & BiographyEmotionalNonfiction
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