Reading: Reading List (Non-Fiction)

Before The Perfect Storm, before In the Heart of the Sea, Steven Callahan's dramatic tale of survival at sea was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than thirty-six weeks. In some ways the model for the new wave of adventure books, Adrift is an undeniable seafaring classic, a riveting firsthand account by the only man known to have survived more than a month alone at sea, fighting for his life in an inflatable raft after his small sloop capsized only six days out.

The inspiration for a major motion picture, Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over incredible adversity, and the healing power of love.

A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape; the U.S. interstate system changed the face of our country. The Big Roads charts the creation of these essential American highways. From the turn-of-the-century car racing entrepreneur who spurred the citizen-led "Good Roads" movement, to the handful of driven engineers who conceived of the interstates and how they would work years before President Eisenhower knew the plans existed.

A journey into one of the most fascinating minds alive today--guided by the owner himself. Bestselling author Daniel Tammet ("Thinking in Numbers") is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head. Fascinating and inspiring, "Born on a Blue Day" explores what it's like to be special and gives us an insight into what makes us all human--our minds.

Elyn R. Saks is an esteemed professor, lawyer, and psychiatrist and is the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School, yet she has suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life, and still has ongoing major episodes of the illness. THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD is the eloquent, moving story of Elyn's life, from the first time that she heard voices speaking to her as a young teenager, to attempted suicides in college, through learning to live on her own as an adult in an often terrifying world.

This book chronicles the unforgettable account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games--games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart.Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict.

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

A finely wrought memoir of mental health, "Detour" takes a genre explored by Susanna Kaysen and Kay Redfield Jamison and propels it in a revelatory and rebellious new direction. "Detour" is the extraordinary first book by Lizzie Simon, a twenty-three-year-old woman with bipolar disorder. We meet her as she is set to abandon her successful career as a theatrical producer in New York City, with plans to hit the road and find other bipolars like herself -- young, ambitious, opinionated, and truth-seeking. Her goal: to speak with them candidly without judgment, fear, or the slightest trace of anything clinical or jargon-laden. She wants their stories in "their" words.

Growing up in the fifties, Carolyn Spiro was always in the shadow of her more intellectually dominant and social outgoing twin, Pamela. But as the twins approached adolescence, Pamela began to succumb to schizophrenia, hearing disembodied voices and eventually suffering many breakdowns and hospitalizations. Divided Minds is a dual memoir of identical twins, one of whom faces a life sentence of schizophrenia, and the other who becomes a psychiatrist, after entering the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister.

Gang- and drug-related inner-city violence, with its attendant epidemic of incarceration, is the defining crime problem in our country. In some neighborhoods in America, one out of every two hundred young black men is shot to death every year, and few initiatives of government and law enforcement have made much difference. But when David Kennedy, a self-taught and then-unknown criminologist, engineered the "Boston Miracle" in the mid-1990s, he pointed the way toward what few had imagined: a solution. Don't Shoot tells the story of Kennedy's long journey.

Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama's struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother ; a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

When Bob Tarte bought a house in rural Michigan, he was counting on a tranquil haven. Then Bob married Linda. She wanted a rabbit, which seemed innocuous enough until the bunny chewed through their electrical wiring. And that was just the beginning. Before long, Bob found himself constructing cages, buying feed, clearing duck waste, and spoon-feeding a menagerie of furry and feathery residents. His life of quiet serenity vanished, and he unwittingly became a servant to a relentlessly demanding family.

Juliette Gordon Low witnessed important eras in U.S. history, from the Civil War and Reconstruction to westward expansion to post World War I. And she made history by founding the first national organization to bring girls from all backgrounds into the out-of-doors. Daisy created controversy by encouraging them to prepare not only for traditional homemaking but also for roles as professional women in the arts, sciences, and business and for active citizenship outside the home. Her group also welcomed girls with disabilities at a time when they were usually excluded.

How is it that, half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, educational opportunities remain so unequal for black and white students, not to mention poor and wealthy ones? In his important new book, Five Miles Away, A World Apart, James E. Ryan answers this question by tracing the fortunes of two schools in Richmond, Virginia--one in the city and the other in the suburbs. Ryan shows how court rulings in the 1970s, limiting the scope of desegregation, laid the groundwork for the sharp disparities between urban and suburban public schools that persist to this day.

On January 8, 2011, while meeting with her constituents in Tucson, Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords was the victim of an assassination attempt that left six people dead and thirteen wounded. Gabby was shot in the head; doctors called her survival "miraculous."

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years in the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers.

Unhappily married to a Nazi arms dealer, Lamarr fled to America at the start of World War II; she brought with her not only her theatrical talent but also a gift for technical innovation. An introduction to Antheil at a Hollywood dinner table culminated in a U.S. patent for a jam- proof radio guidance system for torpedoes the unlikely duo's gift to the U.S. war effort.

This is a tale of medical wonders and medical arrogance, racism, poverty and the bond that grows, sometimes painfully, between two very different women - Skloot and Deborah Lacks - sharing an obsession to learn about Deborah's mother, Henrietta, and her magical, immortal cells. Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year-old black mother of five in Baltimore when she died of cervical cancer in 1951. Without her knowledge, doctors treating her at Johns Hopkins took tissue samples from her cervix for research. They spawned the first viable, indeed miraculously productive, cell line known as HeLa. These cells have aided in medical discoveries from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments.

From Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Rick Atkinson comes an eyewitness account of the war against Iraq and a vivid portrait of a remarkable group of soldiers For soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, the road to Baghdad began with a midnight flight out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in late February 2003.

A moving, darkly funny memoir about a life that has taken him from developing exploding guitars for KISS to building a family of his own. It's a strange, sly, indelible account--sometimes alien yet always deeply human.

Imagine a young boy who has never had a loving home. His only possessions are the old, torn clothes he carries in a paper bag. The only world he knows is one of isolation and fear. Although others had rescued this boy from his abusive alcoholic mother, his real hurt is just beginning -- he has no place to call home. This is Dave Pelzer's long-awaited sequel to A Child Called "It".

"I didn't tell anyone that I was going to Santa Fe to kill myself." On the outside, Terri Cheney was a highly successful, attractive Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer. But behind her seemingly flawless facade lay a dangerous secret; for the better part of her life Cheney had been battling debilitating bipolar disorder and concealing a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions meant to stabilize her moods and make her "normal."

Based on never-before-released material, the true story of Conan Doyle and Houdini's search for the truth about the afterlife Renowned mystery author Arthur Conan Doyle and famous illusionist Harry Houdini first met in 1920, during the magician's tour of England. At the time, Conan Doyle had given up his lucrative writing career, killing off Sherlock Holmes in the process, in order to concentrate on his increasingly manic interest in Spiritualism.

Includes... Andrew Kehoe and the Bath School Massacre The rise and fall of the Purple Gang in Detroit The Michigan victims of lonely hearts killers Beck and Fernandez Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance The criminal career of Coral Watts

The life of a person with bipolar disorder can be tumultuous. Imagine living in a world divided into many parts: one is fast-paced, frantic, energetic--you are at the top of your game and feeling invincible; another is so bleak and dark that even the simple task of going to the store requires Herculean effort. Now imagine a third: going about your daily routing when another manifestation, the mixed state, combines these symptoms simultaneously. This is just a glimpse into the world of a person with bipolar disorder.

When Jerry and Mary Newport met, the connection was instant. A musical genius and a mathematical wonder, the two shared astronomic IQs, but they also shared something else -- they both were diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that affects millions of Americans and makes social contact painfully unbearable. When Jerry and Mary married, they were catapulted into the limelight. They appeared on "60 Minutes" and soon were known as "superstars in the world of autism," shining examples of two people who refused to give up in the face of their mutual challenge.

After thirty distinguished years of psychiatry and groundbreaking research on the human brain, Dr. Small has seen it all--now he is ready to open his office doors for the first time and tell all about the most mysterious, intriguing, and bizarre patients of his career. The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head is a spellbinding record of the doctor's most bewildering cases, from naked headstands and hysterical blindness to fainting schoolgirls and self-amputations. It is an illuminating journey into the mind of a practicing psychiatrist and his life in medicine as it evolves over time--a behind-the-scenes look at the field and a variety of mental diseases as they've never been seen or diagnosed before.

Biography of boxer Joe Louis.

The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policymakers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has had on various demographic populations around the world and throughout history.

This best-selling memoir from Richard Proenneke's journals and with firsthand knowledge of his subject and the setting, Sam Keith has woven a tribute to a man who carved his masterpiece out of the beyond; To live in a pristine land unchanged by man . . . to roam a wilderness through which few other humans has passed . . . to choose an idyllic site, cut trees by hand, and build a log cabin. . . to be self-sufficient craftsman, making what is needed from materials available...to be not at odds with the world, but content with one's own thoughts, dreams and company.

At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child -- the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her.

You may know that actor Dustin Hoffman met with several people with savant syndrome when he was developing his character Raymond Babbitt for the Oscar-winning movie, Rain Man. What you might not know, though, is that the original screenplay written by Barry Morrow was based on the life of a man named Kim Peek, whom Morrow met in 1984. In The Real Rain Man, Kim Peek's father, Fran Peek, provides the story of Kim's life. Readers learn of Kim's amazing mental ability to calculate the day of the week for a particular date (called calendar calculation), his encyclopedic factual knowledge, and his photographic (eidetic) memory. But Kim is more than just these abilities, and Fran gives readers a well-rounded picture of the whole person.

This very personal exploration of schizophrenia explores each stage, from the early signs and reactions from friends and family to seeking help and the challenges of recovery. McLean bravely shares his paranoid delusions and offers both a verbal and a visual experience by including digital artwork he created to help objectify and control his impulses and fears. As McLean relates his experiences step by step, issues of sexuality, identity, and drug abuse are discussed, along with the overarching issues relating to mental health and the medical profession.

In 'Rez Life', Treuer brings a novelist's storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present. Exploring crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture, 'Rez Life' is a strikingly original work of history and reportage, in the Native American story.

Rosa Parks is best known for the day she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, sparking the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Yet there is much more to her story than this one act of defiance. In this straightforward, compelling autobiography, Rosa Parks talks candidly about the civil rights movement and her active role in it.

A successful magazine editor and prize-winning journalist, Sally Brampton launched Elle magazine in the UK in 1985. But behind the successful, glamorous career was a story that many of her friends and colleagues knew nothing about-her ongoing struggle with severe depression and alcoholism. Brampton's is a candid, tremendously honest telling of how she was finally able to "address the elephant in the room," and of a culture that sends the overriding message that people who suffer from depression are somehow responsible for their own illness.

The captivating subject of Oliver Sack's Anthropologist on Mars, here is Temple Grandin's personal account of living with autism extraordinary gift of animal empathy has transformed her world and ours. Temple Grandin is renowned throughout the world as a designer of livestock holding equipment.

What was it like for a mother to flee slavery, leaving her children behind? To Free a Family tells the remarkable story of Mary Walker, who in August 1848 fled her owner for refuge in the North and spent the next seventeen years trying to recover her family. Her freedom, like that of thousands who escaped from bondage, came at a great price-remorse at parting without a word, fear for her family's fate. This story is anchored in two extraordinary collections of letters and diaries, that of her former North Carolina slaveholders and that of the northern family-Susan and Peter Lesley-who protected and employed her.

On January 20, 2009, 1.8 million people crowded the grounds of the Capitol to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama. Among the masses was Charlayne Hunter-Gault. She had flown from South Africa for the occasion, to witness what was for many the culmination of the long struggle for civil rights in the United States. In this compelling personal history, she uses the event to look back on her own involvement in the civil rights movement, as one of two black students who forced the University of Georgia to integrate, and to relate the pivotal events that swept the South as the movement gathered momentum through the early 1960s.

Includes... Andrew Kehoe and the Bath School Massacre The rise and fall of the Purple Gang in Detroit The Michigan victims of lonely hearts killers Beck and Fernandez Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance The criminal career of Coral Watts

From a leading international authority on manic-depressive illness--and one of only a handful of women who are full professors of medicine--comes a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since childhood with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life.

A laugh-out-loud account of an outrageously rugged hike--by the beloved comic author of Lost Continent and Notes from a Small Island.

"War Reporting for Cowards is the Iraq War--with all of its horrors and absurdities--through the eyes of a "war virgin" who was there, in the heat of battle, and wishing he were anywhere but. After signing a $1 million life-insurance policy, studying a tutorial on repairing severed limbs, and spending $20,000 in camping gear (only to find out that his bright yellow tent makes him a sitting duck). Ayres is embedded with the Long-Distance Death Dealers, a battalion of gun ho Marines who, when they aren't playing Monopoly using Baghdad and France as Park Place and Boardwalk, are a "dis-assembly line, churning out Iraqi body parts."

Krakauer ("Into the Wild") chronicles the riveting, tragic story of former NFL player Pat Tillman, who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004, in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death.

"Our country is lucky to have Jerry Dennis. A conservationist with the soul of a poet whose beat is Wild Michigan, Dennis is a kindred spirit of Aldo Leopold and Sigurd Olson. The Windward Shore---his newest effort---is a beautifully written and elegiac memoir of outdoor discovery.

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems--the rational mind and the emotional mind--that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort--but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.