From the excesses of the late 19th-century Gilded Age, through the horrors of World War I, to the transformations of the Roaring 20s that gave birth to her magisterial Etiquette, Emily Post unfailingly took the measure of her era. A Baltimore blue blood with a populist heart, she helped the masses live the American dream with her hugely popular book, which has been continuously in print for over 85 years.

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

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.

When 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: At the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?

Charity Tillemann-Dick was a vivacious young American soprano studying at the celebrated Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest when she received devastating news: her lungs were failing, her heart was three and a half sizes too big, and she would die within five years. Inexplicably, despite her fatal pulmonary condition, she could still sing. Medical experts advised Charity to abandon her musical dreams, but if her time was running out, she wanted to spend it doing what she loved.

In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.

After being diagnosed in her early forties with metastatic melanoma - a "rapidly fatal" form of cancer - journalist and mother of two Mary Elizabeth Williams finds herself in a race against the clock. She takes a once-in-a-lifetime chance and joins a clinical trial for immunotherapy, a revolutionary drug regimen that trains the body to vanquish malignant cells. Astonishingly, her cancer disappears entirely in just a few weeks. But at the same time, her best friend embarks on a cancer journey of her own - with very different results.

101 True Stories about how Positive Thinking can change your life! Everyone needs a little attitude adjustment once in a while, and these amazing true life stories reveal how real people used positive thinking to improve their lives and overcome challenges. You’ll read stories about how you can make every day a special day, incorporate gratitude and joy into your daily life, count your blessings and change your outlook, use a few well-chosen words to reorient your life, manage cancer and other health challenges through a positive attitude, simplify and have a more meaningful life and more!

Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She’d lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry’s death, she decided to make one small change in her life - she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell.

In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease.

Written by Deborah Ziegler, the mother of Brittany Maynard - a 29-year-old woman with a terminal brain tumor - this touching and beautiful memoir captures and celebrates her daughter's spirit and the mostly untold story of Brittany's last year of life as she chose her right to die with dignity, a journey that inspired millions.

As a young dad, Bruce Feiler, New York Times best-selling author and television host, received shattering news. A rare form of cancer was threatening not only his life but his family's future as well. A singular question emerged: Who would be there for his wife and daughters if he were gone? Feiler reached out to six extraordinary men who helped shape him and asked them to be present in the lives of his daughters. The Council of Dads is the unforgettable portrait of these men, who offer wisdom, humor, and guidance on how to live, love, question, and dream.

When Amy B. Scher was struck with undiagnosed late-stage, chronic Lyme disease, the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal. Deteriorating rapidly, she went on a search to save her own life - from the top experts in Los Angeles and the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. After exhausting all of her options in the US, she discovered a possible cure - but it was highly experimental, available only in India, and had as much of a probability of killing her as it did of curing her.

Throughout her recent bout with breast cancer, Letty Cottin Pogrebin became fascinated by her friends’ and family’s diverse reactions to her and her illness: how awkwardly some of them behaved, how some misspoke or misinterpreted her needs, and how wonderful it was when people read her right. She began talking to her fellow patients and dozens of other veterans of serious illness, seeking to discover what sick people wished their friends knew about how best to comfort, help, and even simply talk to them.

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.

In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.

101 True Stories about how Positive Thinking can change your life! Everyone needs a little attitude adjustment once in a while, and these amazing true life stories reveal how real people used positive thinking to improve their lives and overcome challenges. You’ll read stories about how you can make every day a special day, incorporate gratitude and joy into your daily life, count your blessings and change your outlook, use a few well-chosen words to reorient your life, manage cancer and other health challenges through a positive attitude, simplify and have a more meaningful life and more!

When Amy B. Scher was struck with undiagnosed late-stage, chronic Lyme disease, the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal. Deteriorating rapidly, she went on a search to save her own life - from the top experts in Los Angeles and the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis to a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. After exhausting all of her options in the US, she discovered a possible cure - but it was highly experimental, available only in India, and had as much of a probability of killing her as it did of curing her.

When Joselin Linder was in her 20s, her legs started to swell. She thought little of it until her health problems started to compound in ways that baffled her doctors. Diagnosed with extreme liver blockage and dangerous levels of lymph fluid, Joselin turned to the most similar case she could think of - her father's.

Crushed between a truck and a tree, Simon and his wife were both pronounced dead at the scene of a horrific car accident. Enduring a broken skull, jaw, arms, clavicle and pelvis, followed by a coma, Simon lives to tell his remarkable journey from tragedy to triumph.

Julia Fox Garrison refused to listen to the professionals she called Dr. Jerk and Dr. Panic, who - after she suffered a massive, debilitating stroke at age thirty-seven - told her she’d probably die, or to Nurse Doom, who ignored her emergency call button. Instead she heeded the advice of kind, gifted Dr. Neuro, who promised her he would “treat your mind as well as your body.” Julia figured if she could somehow manage to get herself into a wheelchair, at least she’d always find parking. But after many, many months of hospitalization and rehab, Julia not only got into a wheelchair, but she got back out.

A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to yourself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones you love. But when her sister, Maggie, needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love.

Oprah Winfrey has called him an inspiration, Maya Angelou saw him as a kindred spirit and fellow poet, and Jimmy Carter described Mattie Stepanek as the "most remarkable person I have ever known". When Jerry Lewis received his lifetime achievement award at the Oscars, footage of Mattie played behind him. Five years after his death from a rare neuromuscular disease, Mattie is still being celebrated for his indomitable spirit and message of hope.

You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.

Hoping for the stability he needs to start a family, Sandeep Jauhar, an attending cardiologist, accepts a position at a massive teaching hospital on the outskirts of Queens. With a decade's worth of elite medical training behind him, he is eager to settle down and reap the rewards of countless sleepless nights. Instead, he is confronted with sobering truths. Doctors' morale is low and getting lower.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves - "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care - ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for 20 years. Laguna Honda, lower-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished.

Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.

This collection of true stories champions the daily contributions, commitments, and sacrifices of nurses and portrays the compassion, intellect, and wit necessary to meet the challenging demands of the profession.

What makes you happy? Others share how they found their passion, purpose, and joy in life in these 101 personal and exciting stories that are sure to inspire and encourage listeners to find their own happiness. Chicken Soup for the Soul: Find Your Happiness will encourage listeners to pursue their dreams, find their passion and seek joy in their life with its 101 personal and inspiring stories. This book continues Chicken Soup for the Soul’s focus on inspiration and hope, reminding us that we all can find our own happiness.