Julie N. Young

At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper-middle-class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets.

You'll learn why things are out of control so you can get them back in order and keep them that way. You'll uncover the mental and emotional roots of clutter - guilt, fear, rebellion, habit - so you can get rid of it. Even the best cleaning methods are useless if you can't keep up and soon slip back into old habits. Stop struggling. You can overcome that old, unsuccessful mind-set and discover a new way of thinking that makes messiness a thing of the past.

In Being Mortal, best-selling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending. Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit.