Recommendations based on "Axiomatic"

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Passionate advocate for end-of-life care and TikTok star Hadley Vlahos shares moving stories of joy, wisdom, and redemption from her patients’ final moments in this “brilliant” (Zibby Owens, Good Morning America) memoir.“This extraordinary book helps dispel fear around death and dying—revealing it to be a natural part of our soul’s evolution.”—Laura Lynne Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Signs and The Light Between UsTalking about death and dying is considered taboo in polite company, and even in the medical field. Our ideas about dying are confusing at best: Will our memories flash before our eyes? Regrets consume our thoughts? Does a bright light appear at the end of a tunnel? For most people, it will be a slower process, one eased with preparedness, good humor, and a bit of faith. At the forefront of changing attitudes around palliative care is hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos, who shows that end-of-life care can teach us just as much about how to live as it does about how we die.Vlahos was raised in a strict religious household, but began questioning her beliefs in high school after the sudden death of a friend. When she got pregnant at nineteen, she was shunned by her community and enrolled herself in nursing school to be able to support herself and her baby. But nursing soon became more than a job: when she focused on palliative care and hospice work, it became a calling.In The In-Between, Vlahos recounts the most impactful experiences she’s had with the people she’s worked with—from the woman who never once questioned her faith until she was close to death, to the older man seeing visions of his late daughter, to the young patient who laments that she spent too much of her short life worrying about what others thought of her—while also sharing her own fascinating journey.Written with profound insight, humility, and respect, The In-Between is a heartrending memoir that shows how caring for others can transform a life while also offering wisdom and comfort for those dealing with loss and providing inspiration for how to live now.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “profound and beautiful” (Marilynne Robinson) account of joy and sorrow from one of the great writers of our time, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize“I will stake my reputation on you being blown away by Lost & Found.”—Anne Lamott, author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Bird by BirdLONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDALONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PeopleONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, NPR, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Vulture, She Reads, Book Riot, Publishers WeeklyOne spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.Those twin experiences form the heart of Lost & Found, a profound meditation on the families that make us and the families we make. But Schulz’s book also explores how disappearance and discovery shape us all. On average, we each lose two hundred thousand objects over our lifetime, and Schulz brilliantly illuminates the relationship between those everyday losses and our most devastating ones. Likewise, she explores the importance of seeking, whether for ancient ruins or new ideas, friends, faith, meaning, or love. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to sustaining wonder and gratitude even in the face of loss and grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, and humor about the connections between joy and sorrow—and between us all.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A fascinating exploration of the intricacies of how we remember, why we forget, and what we can do to protect our memories, from the Harvard-trained neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice.“Using her expertise as a neuroscientist and her gifts as a storyteller, Lisa Genova explains the nuances of human memory”—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of How the Mind WorksHave you ever felt a crushing wave of panic when you can't for the life of you remember the name of that actor in the movie you saw last week, or you walk into a room only to forget why you went there in the first place? If you're over forty, you're probably not laughing. You might even be worried that these lapses in memory could be an early sign of Alzheimer's or dementia. In reality, for the vast majority of us, these examples of forgetting are completely normal. Why? Because while memory is amazing, it is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember every name we hear, plan we make, or day we experience. Just because your memory sometimes fails doesn't mean it's broken or succumbing to disease. Forgetting is actually part of being human.In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day). You'll come to appreciate the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer's (that you own a car). And you'll see how memory is profoundly impacted by meaning, emotion, sleep, stress, and context. Once you understand the language of memory and how it functions, its incredible strengths and maddening weaknesses, its natural vulnerabilities and potential superpowers, you can both vastly improve your ability to remember and feel less rattled when you inevitably forget. You can set educated expectations for your memory, and in doing so, create a better relationship with it. You don't have to fear it anymore. And that can be life-changing.

What I hope is that people reading this book will bear in mind that we are human beings first, inmates second.--Bonnie ForeshawIn a stunning new work of insight and hope, New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb once again reveals his unmatched talent for finding the humanity in the lost and lonely and celebrates the transforming power of the written word.For the past several years, Lamb has taught writing to a group of women prisoners at York Correctional Institution. At first mistrustful of Lamb, one another, and the writing process, over time these students let down their guard, picked up their pens, and discovered their voices. In this unforgettable collection, the women of York describe in their own words how they were imprisoned by abuse, rejection, and their own self-destructive impulses long before they entered the criminal justice system. Yet these are stories of hope, humor, and triumph in the face of despair. Having used writing as a tool to unlock their creativity and begin the process of healing, these amazing writers have left victimhood behind.In his powerful introduction, Lamb describes the incredible journey of expression and self-awareness the women took through their writings and shares how they challenged him as a teacher and as a fellow author. In "Hair Chronicles," Tabatha Rowley tells her life history through her past hairstyles -- outer signals to the world each time she reinvented herself and eventually came to prize her own self-worth. Brenda Medina admits in "Hell, and How I got Here" that she continued to rebel in prison until her parents' abiding love made her realize that her misbehavior was hurting them and herself deeply. In "Faith, Power, and Pants," Bonnie Foreshaw describes how faith has carried her through trials in life and in prison and has allowed her to understand her past actions, to look toward the future, and to believe that she will once again taste home cooking. Couldn't Keep It to Myself is a true testament to the process of finding oneself and working toward a better day.

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.

From the Publisher Thirty-two years ago, my mother's best friend died on the operating table. She felt herself moving toward a brilliant light and spoke with her father who had passed away years before. Ultimately, she made the decision to return to take care of her two young children. Although this was the most peaceful experience of her life, she kept it a secret until the publication of books like CLOSER TO THE LIGHT and TRANSFORMED BY THE LIGHT. Reading the experiences of others gave her the freedom to speak openly about what it means to die and why there is little to fear. Lorelei Andrysick Ballantine Advertising

The multi-award-winning meditation on survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world'Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange:Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it.Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects?I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt.What do you think would happen?People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.'When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.

The true story of Melody, aged 8, the last of five siblings to be taken from her drug dependent single mother and brought into care. When Cathy is told about Melody's terrible childhood, she is sure she's heard it all before. But it isn't long before she feels there is more going on than she or the social services are aware of. Although Melody is angry at having to leave her mother, as many children coming into care are, she also worries about her obsessively - far more than is usual. Amanda, Melody's mother, is also angry and takes it out on Cathy at contact, which again is something Cathy has experienced before. Yet there is a lost and vulnerable look about Amanda, and Cathy starts to see why Melody worries about her and feels she needs looking after. When Amanda misses contact, it is assumed she has forgotten, but nothing could have been further from the truth...

The Whole Story is an attempt to capture trauma and the changes in our thought patterns as a result. After years of complex trauma one can feel like they are drowning in unrelenting crises. This can lead to an extremely abusive relationship. The Whole Story explores how trauma can intrude on our lives when we are finally safe and happy. Trauma can still interrupt life once it's over. To gain control of this story, life, and our past, we must cling to something, like these words. These words go out into the world with the goal of exemplifying just how tumultuous trauma and healing can be. Most of all, you have to see how worthy you are, and that you deserve to care for and love yourself. We all do.

From a talented emerging Australian writer, a brave, honest, unforgettable memoir about mental illness that breaks the silence and shatters the taboos to give hope to all those struggling to find their way through. 'When I was eleven years old Mum told me, "One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name." Even before I heard these words I was always a child who crammed intense joy into tiny pockets of time.' One day Sophie Hardcastle realised the joy she'd always known had disappeared. She was constantly tired, with no energy, no motivation and no sense of enjoyment for surfing, friends, conversations, movies, parties, family - for anything. Her hours became empty. And then, the month before she turned seventeen, that emptiness filled with an intense, unbearable sadness that made her scream and tear at her skin. Misdiagnosed with chronic fatigue, then major depression, then temporal lobe epilepsy, she was finally told - three years, two suicide attempts and five hospital admissions later - that she had Bipolar 1 Disorder. In this honest and beautifully told memoir, Sophie lays bare her story of mental illness - of a teenage girl using drugs, alcohol and sex in an attempt to fix herself; of her family's anguish and her loss of self. It is a brave and hopeful story of adaptation, learning to accept and of ultimately realising that no matter how deep you have sunk, the surface is always within reach. Running Like China shatters the silence and smashes the taboos around mental illness. It is an unforgettable story.