The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum is a groundbreaking exploration into the science of autism, authored by the renowned Temple Grandin and Richard Panek.

Weaving her own experiences with remarkable new discoveries, Grandin introduces the neuroimaging advances and genetic research that link brain science to behavior. She even shares her own brain scans from numerous studies. Readers will meet the scientists and self-advocates who are introducing innovative theories about what causes autism, how it is diagnosed, and how best to treat it.

Grandin highlights long-ignored sensory problems and the treatments that might help them, and warns of the dangers of politics defining the diagnosis of autism spectrum.

Most excitingly, in the science that has begun to reveal the long-overlooked strengths conferred by autism, she finds a route to more effective mainstreaming and a way to unleash the unique advantages of autistic people. From the "aspies" in Silicon Valley to the five-year-old without language, Grandin understands the true meaning of the word spectrum.

The Autistic Brain is essential reading from one of the most respected and beloved voices in the field.

The Story of the Human Body offers a fascinating exploration of how the human body has evolved over millions of years. Daniel E. Lieberman, a leader in the field of human evolutionary biology, presents a lucid and engaging account of the evolutionary transformations that have shaped our bodies.

The book delves into the rise of bipedalism, the shift to a non-fruit-based diet, and the advent of hunting and gathering, which led to our superlative endurance athleticism. Lieberman also discusses the development of our large brains and the emergence of cultural proficiencies.

Moreover, the book examines how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution and how it has further transformed our bodies during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. While these changes have brought numerous benefits, they've also created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, leading to increased incidences of obesity and new, avoidable diseases like type 2 diabetes.

Lieberman introduces the concept of "dysevolution," where only the symptoms of chronic illnesses are treated rather than their causes. He advocates for using evolutionary information to help create a healthier environment.

Zones of social abandonment are emerging everywhere in Brazil's big cities—places like Vita, where the unwanted, the mentally ill, the sick, and the homeless are left to die. This haunting, unforgettable story centers on a young woman named Catarina, increasingly paralyzed and said to be mad, living out her time at Vita.

Anthropologist João Biehl leads a detective-like journey to know Catarina; to unravel the cryptic, poetic words that are part of the "dictionary" she is compiling; and to trace the complex network of family, medicine, state, and economy in which her abandonment and pathology took form. As Biehl painstakingly relates Catarina's words to a vanished world and elucidates her condition, we learn of subjectivities unmade and remade under economic pressures, pharmaceuticals as moral technologies, a public common sense that lets the unsound and unproductive die, and anthropology's unique power to work through these juxtaposed fields.

Vita's methodological innovations, bold fieldwork, and rigorous social theory make it an essential reading for anyone who is grappling with how to understand the conditions of life, thought, and ethics in the contemporary world.

«Éste es un libro sobre la vida... apasionado y alegre, sentimental y burlón.» ROSA MONTERO.

Cuando Rosa Montero leyó el maravilloso diario que Marie Curie comenzó tras la muerte de su esposo, y que se incluye al final de este libro, sintió que la historia de esa mujer fascinante que se enfrentó a su época le llenaba la cabeza de ideas y emociones. La ridícula idea de no volver a verte nació de ese incendio de palabras, de ese vertiginoso torbellino. Al hilo de la extraordinaria trayectoria de Curie, Rosa Montero construye una narración a medio camino entre el recuerdo personal y la memoria de todos, entre el análisis de nuestra época y la evocación íntima. Son páginas que hablan de la superación del dolor, de las relaciones entre hombres y mujeres, del esplendor del sexo, de la buena muerte y de la bella vida, de la ciencia y de la ignorancia, de la fuerza salvadora de la literatura y de la sabiduría de quienes aprenden a disfrutar de la existencia con plenitud y con ligereza.

Vivo, libérrimo y original, este libro inclasificable incluye fotos, remembranzas, amistades y anécdotas que transmiten el primitivo placer de escuchar buenas historias. Un texto auténtico, emocionante y cómplice que te atrapará desde sus primeras páginas.

Redefining Success details how W. Brett Wilson was forced to redefine his life, making health and key relationships his first priorities. Through trial and error, he discovered that these simple virtues are foundations for real, enduring success, both in business and in life.

Wilson's compelling insights are the basis for Redefining Success. Not just for entrepreneurs and business people, the book outlines how we can change our lives for the better by re-evaluating our personal definitions of success, then reworking them into a life plan that is feasible, lasting, and rewarding. Inspirational and paradigm-changing, Redefining Success will help you implement and sustain lasting, positive change in your life—and make your world a little more meaningful—every day.

If you are suffering chronic pain—even after years of surgery, rehabilitation, and medication—only one question matters: How do I find lasting relief? With Freedom from Pain, two pioneers in the field of pain and trauma recovery address a crucial missing factor essential to long-term healing: addressing the unresolved emotional trauma held within the body.

Informed by their founding work in the Somatic Experiencing® process and unique insights gleaned from decades of clinical success, Drs. Levine and Phillips will show you how to:

• Calm the body's overreactive "fight" response to pain
• Release the fear, frustration, and depression intensified by prior traumas, and build inner resilience and self-regulation
• Relieve pain caused by the aftermath of injuries, surgical procedures, joint and muscle conditions, migraines, and other challenges

Whether you're seeking to begin a self-care strategy or amplify your current treatment program, Freedom from Pain will provide you with proven tools to help you experience long-term relief.

With Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google's earliest engineers and a personal growth pioneer, offers a proven method for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in life and work.

Tan's role involves teaching Google's best and brightest how to apply mindfulness techniques in the office and beyond. Now, readers everywhere can gain insider access to one of the most sought-after classes in the country—a course in health, happiness, and creativity that is improving the livelihood and productivity of those responsible for one of the most successful businesses in the world.

With forewords by Daniel Goleman, author of the international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, a renowned mindfulness expert and author of Coming To Our Senses, Tan's book is an invaluable guide to achieving your own best potential.

Can we live robustly until our last breath?

Do we have to suffer from debilitating conditions and sickness? Is it possible to add more vibrant years to our lives? In the #1 New York Times bestselling The End of Illness, Dr. David Agus tackles these fundamental questions and dismantles misperceptions about what "health" really means.

Presenting an eye-opening picture of the human body and all the ways it works—and fails—Dr. Agus shows us how a new perspective on our individual health will allow us to achieve a long, vigorous life.

Offering insights and access to powerful new technologies that promise to transform medicine, Dr. Agus emphasizes his belief that there is no "right" answer, no master guide that is "one size fits all." Each one of us must get to know our bodies in uniquely personal ways, and he shows us exactly how to do that.

A bold call for all of us to become our own personal health advocates, The End of Illness is a moving departure from orthodox thinking.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry is a compelling exploration into the world of psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and others who study them. Bestselling journalist Jon Ronson delves into a potential hoax that has been played on the world's top neurologists, leading him into the heart of the madness industry.

An influential psychologist, convinced that many CEOs and politicians are actually psychopaths, teaches Ronson to identify these individuals through subtle verbal and nonverbal clues. With his newfound skills, Ronson navigates the corridors of power, encountering a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud, a CEO renowned for his psychopathy, and a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane who claims his sanity.

Through his journey, Ronson not only uncovers the mystery of the hoax but also reveals the disturbing truth that those at the forefront of the madness industry can be as mad as those they study. He highlights how increasingly, ordinary people are defined by their most extreme traits.

The Polyvagal Theory offers a collection of groundbreaking research by a leading figure in neuroscience. This book compiles, for the first time, Stephen W. Porges’s decades of research.

A leading expert in developmental psychophysiology and developmental behavioral neuroscience, Porges is the mind behind the groundbreaking Polyvagal Theory, which has startling implications for the treatment of anxiety, depression, trauma, and autism.

Adopted by clinicians around the world, the Polyvagal Theory has provided exciting new insights into the way our autonomic nervous system unconsciously mediates social engagement, trust, and intimacy.

Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain is a searing, unflinchingly honest memoir by actress Portia de Rossi, where she shares the truth of her long battle to overcome anorexia and bulimia while living in the public eye. It details the new happiness and health she has found in recent years, including her coming out and her marriage to Ellen DeGeneres.

Portia de Rossi reveals the pain and illness that haunted her for decades, starting when she was a twelve-year-old girl working as a model in Australia, through her early rise to fame as a cast member of the hit television show Ally McBeal. All the while, she was terrified that the truth of her sexuality would be exposed in the tabloids. She alternately starved herself and binged, putting her life in danger and concealing the seriousness of her illness from herself and everyone around her.

The memoir explores the pivotal moments of her childhood that set her on the road to illness and describes the elaborate rituals around food that dominated hours of every day. She also reveals the heartache and fear that accompany a life lived in the closet, a sense of isolation that was only magnified by her unrelenting desire to be ever thinner. From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to health and honesty, emerging as an outspoken and articulate advocate for gay rights and women's health issues.

Unbearable Lightness is a landmark book that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit, shining a bright light on the dark subject of eating disorders and the complex emotional truth surrounding food, weight, and body image.

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine is a groundbreaking analysis that delves into more than 30 of the most popular alternative healing treatments. From acupuncture to homeopathy, aromatherapy to reflexology, chiropractic to herbal medicines, each is examined for their benefits and potential dangers.

Whether you are an ardent believer in alternative medicine, a skeptic, or simply baffled by the range of services and opinions, this guide lays to rest doubts and contradictions with authority, integrity, and clarity.

Authors Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst strive to reassert the primacy of the scientific method as a means for determining public health practice and policy. They answer pressing questions such as: What works and what doesn't? What are the secrets, and what are the lies? Who can you trust, and who is ripping you off? Can science decide what is best, or do the old wives' tales really tap into ancient, superior wisdom?

In the last thirty years, the big pharmaceutical companies have transformed themselves into marketing machines selling dangerous medicines as if they were Coca-Cola or Cadillacs. They pitch drugs with video games and soft cuddly toys for children; promote them in churches and subways, at NASCAR races and state fairs. They've become experts at promoting fear of disease, just so they can sell us hope.

No question: drugs can save lives. But the relentless marketing that has enriched corporate executives and sent stock prices soaring has come with a dark side. Prescription pills taken as directed by physicians are estimated to kill one American every five minutes. And that figure doesn't reflect the damage done as the overmedicated take to the roads.

Our Daily Meds connects the dots for the first time to show how corporate salesmanship has triumphed over science inside the biggest pharmaceutical companies and, in turn, how this promotion-driven industry has taken over the practice of medicine and is changing American life. It is an ageless story of the battle between good and evil, with potentially life-changing consequences for everyone, not just the 65 percent of Americans who unscrew a prescription cap every day.

An industry with the promise to help so many is now leaving a legacy of needless harm.

Full of spleen, this will be a hilarious, invigorating, and informative journey through the world of Bad Science. When Dr. Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home.

'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently passed an electrical current through the warm salt water. It turned brown. In his words: 'before my very eyes, the world's first Detox Barbie was sat, with her feet in a pool of brown sludge, purged of a weekend's immorality.'

Dr. Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian. This book will be about all the 'bad science' we are constantly bombarded with in the media and in advertising. At a time when science is used to prove everything and nothing, everyone has their own 'bad science' moments - from the useless pie-chart on the back of cereal packets to the use of the word 'visibly' in cosmetics ads. This book will help people to quantify their instincts - that a lot of the so-called 'science' which appears in the media and in advertising is just wrong or misleading. It will be satirical and amusing - exposing the ridiculous - but it will also provide the reader with the facts they need.

Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber offers a groundbreaking perspective on the biology of cancer. He boldly asserts that to combat this disease, we must also engage our natural defenses.

While modern Western medicine excels at detecting and treating cancer, it often overlooks recent discoveries that reveal how we can better protect ourselves. Servan-Schreiber traces the thrilling scientific journeys that led to this approach and provides practical guidance on prevention and complementing traditional treatments—achieving results supported by cutting-edge research—to develop an anticancer biology.

We can all take action in four main areas:

• Shielding ourselves from environmental imbalances
• Adjusting our diet
• Healing psychological wounds
• Reimagining our relationship with our bodies

Speaking not only as a doctor and researcher, Servan-Schreiber shares his personal battle with cancer, recounting his confrontation with the disease and his healing journey. By sharing this deeply personal experience, which emerges as an intense inner adventure, he hopes to empower everyone, regardless of their situation, to maximize their chances of overcoming cancer.

The 50 million Americans who suffer from insomnia need—and want—this answer now. There is no "one size fits all" solution to insomnia because, as this revolutionary book illustrates, there are three types that affect those who suffer from it: difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, and broken sleep. And each of them requires a specialized treatment program.

Now, leading experts in the evaluation and treatment of insomnia deliver personalized programs that provide relief for such persistent sleep problems as:

• Sunday night insomnia
• Anxiety caused by the "dread of bedtime"
• Waking before the alarm
• Awaking with a sudden start or jolt
• Scattered sleep patterns

Based on cutting-edge knowledge of circadian rhythms developed in research labs for decades, this is the first sleep program that helps readers to self-diagnose and treat their particular type of insomnia.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a groundbreaking book by Michael Pollan, one of America's most fascinating, original, and elegant writers. Pollan turns his omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. This question has confronted humanity since the discovery of fire, but how we answer it today may determine our very survival as a species.

Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal. He develops a definitive account of the American way of eating, taking readers from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds. He emphasizes our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the plant and animal species we depend on.

Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest. He explains how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, The Omnivore's Dilemma is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, contending that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do.

Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore's Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

Go Ask Alice is a haunting first-person account of a young girl's descent into the nightmarish world of drug addiction. It begins innocently enough when she is unwittingly served a soft drink laced with LSD at a party. Within months, she finds herself trapped in a downward spiral, moving from a comfortable home and loving family to the mean streets of an unforgiving city.

This journey strips her of her innocence, her youth, and ultimately, her life. The reader is invited to read her diary and enter her world—a world that will be impossible to forget.

With empathy, compassion, and practical tools, developmental psychologist and sufferer of Sensory Defensive Disorder (SD), Sharon Heller, Ph.D., sheds light on a little-known but common affliction. Sufferers react to harmless stimuli as irritating, distracting, or dangerous.

We all know what it feels like to be irritated by loud music, accosted by lights that are too bright, or overwhelmed by a world that moves too quickly. But millions of people suffer from Sensory Defensive Disorder (SD), a common affliction where people react to harmless stimuli not just as a distracting hindrance, but a potentially dangerous threat.

Dr. Heller, being sensory defensive herself, brings both personal and professional perspectives. She is the ideal person to educate the world about this problem, which will only increase as technology and processed environments take over our lives.

In addition to heightening public awareness of this prevalent issue, Dr. Heller provides tools and therapies for alleviating and, in some cases, even eliminating defensiveness altogether.

Until now, treatment for sensory defensiveness has been successfully implemented in Learning Disabled children, where defensiveness tends to be extreme. However, the disorder has generally gone unidentified in adults who think they are either overstimulated, stressed, weird, or crazy. These sensory defensive sufferers live out their lives stressed and unhappy, never knowing why or what they can do about it.

Now, with Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight, they have a compassionate spokesperson and a solution-oriented book of advice.

Prozac Nation is Elizabeth Wurtzel's New York Times best-selling memoir, with a new afterword. The book provides a powerful portrait of one girl's journey through the purgatory of depression and back. The author writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. This witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era is a must-read for fans of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

In 1978, Susan Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as one of the most liberating books of its time. A cancer patient herself when she was writing the book, Sontag shows how the metaphors and myths surrounding certain illnesses, especially cancer, add greatly to the suffering of patients and often inhibit them from seeking proper treatment.

By demystifying the fantasies surrounding cancer, Sontag shows cancer for what it is—just a disease. Cancer, she argues, is not a curse, not a punishment, certainly not an embarrassment and, it is highly curable, if good treatment is followed.

Almost a decade later, with the outbreak of a new, stigmatized disease replete with mystifications and punitive metaphors, Sontag wrote a sequel to Illness as Metaphor, extending the argument of the earlier book to the AIDS pandemic.

These two essays, now published together, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, have been translated into many languages and continue to have an enormous influence on the thinking of medical professionals and, above all, on the lives of many thousands of patients and caregivers.

Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia—until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side—and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.

Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe's greatest writers. A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped. This is not anarchy, this is blindness.

Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet.

When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside favela. Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage.

It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing – and controversial – is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live.

El juguete rabioso es la primera novela del escritor Roberto Arlt –marcadamente autobiográfica– publicada en el año 1926 por la Editorial Latina. Sus manuscritos datan de la década de 1920 y fueron bosquejados por Arlt en las argentinas Sierras de Córdoba, en una época en la cual su mujer, Carmen, atacada por una complicada tuberculosis, debe instalarse en esas geografías para intentar una difícil mejoría.

Arlt, en tanto acompaña a su esposa e invierte una considerable suma de dinero en negocios que no fructifican, hace nacer a El Juguete Rabioso.

This book developed from a journal of my thoughts and feelings recorded in response to the shock of my wife’s diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer in December 2015. Initially, I kept it as a personal diary of things that I believed were important at the time, including the poems and prose I wrote which sprang organically from the events as they unfolded. Whilst these few short months were extremely challenging, at times shocking and ultimately tragic, they were also a time of great love.

Hopefully, I have captured some of those few moments of pure happiness, humour and joy which I believe will not only help other people touched by cancer but will show sufferers and their families that there is no right or wrong way to behave, just as long as you continue to show how much you care and as much as possible, be there for each other.