
The Beauty in Breaking
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Nicole Lewis
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By:
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Michele Harper
About this listen
The New York Times best seller
"Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring." (The New York Times Book Review)
“An incredibly moving memoir about what it means to be a doctor.”—Ellen Pompeo
As seen/heard on Fresh Air, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Weekend Edition, and more
An emergency room physician explores how a life of service to others taught her how to heal herself.
Michele Harper is a female African-American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.
In the ensuing years, as Harper learned to become an effective ER physician, bringing insight and empathy to every patient encounter, she came to understand that each of us is broken—physically, emotionally, psychically. How we recognize those breaks, how we try to mend them, and where we go from there are all crucial parts of the healing process.
The Beauty in Breaking is the poignant true story of Harper's journey toward self-healing. Each of the patients Harper writes about taught her something important about recuperation and recovery. How to let go of fear even when the future is murky: how to tell the truth when it's simpler to overlook it. How to understand that compassion isn't the same as justice. As she shines a light on the systemic disenfranchisement of the patients she treats as they struggle to maintain their health and dignity, Harper comes to understand the importance of allowing ourselves to make peace with the past as we draw support from the present.
In this hopeful, moving, and beautiful audiobook, she passes along the precious, necessary lessons that she has learned as a daughter, a woman, and a physician.
©2020 Michele Harper (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Riveting, heartbreaking, sometimes difficult, always inspiring.”—The New York Times Book Review
“The Beauty in Breaking takes us into the life in an emergency room—the drama, the adrenaline, the emotion—with such immediacy that I could not help but be completely enthralled by the individual stories of the patients that Michele Harper treats. But this powerful, poignant page-turner of a book also tells a much larger and universal story about how healing actually happens, not just for broken bodies but for broken hearts and souls. In sharing the stories of her patients and her own life, Harper shows us that that healing begins only after we are broken open ourselves. And she shows us with hopeful, heartbreaking clarity that it comes from healing each other.”—Kerry Egan, author of On Living
“The Beauty in Breaking is a compelling page-turner about how Dr. Michele Harper took a broken childhood and wove herself into a strong, honest, compassionate doctor. A must read.”—Louann Brizendine, MD, author of The Female Brain
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Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water - and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk.
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Eye Opening
- By Shatan ~Book Attic Confessions on 08-07-18
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The People's Hospital
- Hope and Peril in American Medicine
- By: Ricardo Nuila MD
- Narrated by: Ricardo Nuila MD
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.
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Ben Taub Nurse
- By Patricia Gonzales on 05-11-23
By: Ricardo Nuila MD
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Lost & Found
- A Memoir
- By: Kathryn Schulz
- Narrated by: Kathryn Schulz
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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One 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.
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Bored to death
- By Amazon Customer on 03-15-22
By: Kathryn Schulz
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Unshrunk
- A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
- By: Laura Delano
- Narrated by: Laura Delano
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. At school, Delano was elected the class president and earned straight-As and a national squash ranking; at home, she unleashed all the rage and despair she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, obsessing over death.
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A Rite of Passage For the Rest of Us
- By Metal Rabbit on 04-16-25
By: Laura Delano
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Whiskey Tender
- A Memoir
- By: Deborah Taffa
- Narrated by: Charley Flyte
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories.
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Powerful & Informative
- By Brenda C. on 06-03-24
By: Deborah Taffa
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Reading Lolita in Tehran
- A Memoir in Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Azar Nafisi
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.
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A literary critique of Russian lit.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-15-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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High Achiever
- The Incredible True Story of One Addict's Double Life
- By: Tiffany Jenkins
- Narrated by: Tiffany Jenkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease - whether it’s a loved one or themselves.
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I Get it, You Were an Addict
- By Jim Thompson on 10-16-19
By: Tiffany Jenkins
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Care and Feeding
- A Memoir
- By: Laurie Woolever
- Narrated by: Laurie Woolever
- Length: 12 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there’s more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.
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The raw honesty
- By Amazon Customer on 03-12-25
By: Laurie Woolever
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Daughters of Shandong
- By: Eve J. Chung
- Narrated by: Yu-Li Alice Shen
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Daughters are the Ang family’s curse. In 1948, civil war ravages the Chinese countryside, but in rural Shandong, the wealthy, landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother—abused by the family for failing to birth a boy—finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen.
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Worth the time!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-09-24
By: Eve J. Chung
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The Joy of Movement
- How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage
- By: Kelly McGonigal
- Narrated by: Kelly McGonigal
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Exercise is health-enhancing and life-extending, yet many of us feel it's a chore. But as Kelly McGonigal reveals, it doesn't have to be. Movement can and should be a source of joy. Through her trademark blend of science and storytelling, McGonigal draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology, as well as memoirs, ethnographies, and philosophers. She shows how movement is intertwined with some of the most basic human joys, including self-expression, social connection, and mastery.
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Academic - Not a Self-Help Book
- By PMRisher on 02-15-20
By: Kelly McGonigal
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Know My Name
- A Memoir
- By: Chanel Miller
- Narrated by: Chanel Miller
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral. Now, she reclaims her identity to tell her story of trauma, transcendence, and the power of words.
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Just, thank you.
- By Alysha DeShaé on 09-25-19
By: Chanel Miller
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How to Say Babylon
- A Memoir
- By: Safiya Sinclair
- Narrated by: Safiya Sinclair
- Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.
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The ability of Safia to both tell a gut wrenching story while making beautiful art with her words.
- By Grandchampion on 07-21-24
By: Safiya Sinclair
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What My Bones Know
- A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
- By: Stephanie Foo
- Narrated by: Stephanie Foo
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.
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Complex PTSD from a patient's point of view!
- By Howard_a on 05-24-22
By: Stephanie Foo
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The Last Lecture
- By: Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow
- Narrated by: Erik Singer, Randy Pausch
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave - "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" - wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have... and you may find one day that you have less than you think").
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How to Live
- By Kelli G on 04-21-08
By: Randy Pausch, and others
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Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
- A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
- By: Lori Gottlieb
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
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It was like a hallmark movie being waterboarded into my ears for 15 hours
- By Amazon Customer on 10-01-19
By: Lori Gottlieb
What listeners say about The Beauty in Breaking
Highly rated for:
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- Patricia Callahan
- 08-09-20
I was expecting more...
I really want to like this book. I loved the title and description promised something profound and interesting. I tried so hard and I really gave it a shot, listening to the entire book. And I liked Michelle. She is someone I would enjoy meeting and chatting over a cup of coffee. She is articulate and well spoken.
It seems like she was trying to go for the eat pray love scene. This was her own meditation and her own message as of course this is her own story. Unfortunately, there was nothing new or enlightening here. I listened to it from start to finish in a few days, it was an easy listen to me. But there was nothing new here. I was left disappointed.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Lita
- 03-31-21
This book resonated with me!
The Beauty in Breaking is a memoir of a female African-American ER doctor who was raised in an abusive home and overcame trauma and hardships throughout her life. I loved the author’s perspective on finding balance and healing in a world filled with suffering. I felt a kinship with Dr. Harper as I had thought about becoming a doctor when I was young, but a traumatic loss derailed my plans and I spent a good part of my young adult life seeking understanding and meaning in the events that had unfolded in my life. Michelle Palmer has also clearly done a lot of self work, using yoga, meditative practice, and general self-care to move through her days with love and compassion for others. I loved her stories of life in the ER as they showed that empathy helps us humans to heal. She is a graceful writer and a special soul. Well-written and well-told, I doubt that you will regret hearing her story.
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- Gottalookgoodwhenyouwkout
- 08-28-24
Great stories bring inspiration
I loved the narrator and the passion with which she shared her experiences. The stories were insightful and hopeful. Many thanks for her storytelling gift.
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- Monica MD
- 07-09-20
Fantastic!!
I am a mere 2 chapters in and can’t wait to hear Dr. Harper’s full story unfold. I happened to heard about this book on NPR, a memoir of an ER physician. And a woman, no less! Then to find out she is a black woman—what a rare gem, especially in the field of medicine. As a female Pediatrician, I crave life stories of my colleagues as I know they are likely to be very rich and layered, not just in patient encounters but also in how that person arrived to medicine. I am moved by her story, the suffering she survived, the rawness as she details the darkest chapters of her life. The narration is great. I know this will be a book I send/recommend to my girlfriends & colleagues, especially those in medicine.
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17 people found this helpful
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- SWill
- 06-04-22
Beautifully written
This book made you think about your life, the pause and the little things that we take for granted. I love this book and I will probably read it again. And I most definitely will share it.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Sarah
- 03-08-24
Self congratulatory
I feel this author left many levels of self realization out in what was supposed to be a book on self realization. I feel more could have been uncovered
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- Stephanie Stawski
- 01-15-25
Absolutely inspiring
This is a truly moving compilation of stories. I shed tears multiple times, and when the book was finished, I had a new outlook on my life. The reading is incredible. I am sad that it’s finished. Excellent!
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- Rebecca Merrill
- 03-12-21
Fantastic, thoughtful and uplifting
First, A+ for the narrator. I read the book and listened. This is one of those rare occasions where I prefer the narrated version.
The author shares wonderful, hard earned wisdom. The vignettes are so human and insightful.
The ending is a bit uneventful, but she’s still young and has many more experiences ahead. So perhaps it’s fitting.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-19-21
Engrossing
Mesmerizing and powerful. If you’ve ever wanted to know what an ER is really like behind the scenes, this is for you. Highly recommended.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Tatiana
- 07-24-20
loved it! Honest and beautiful.
This is great book. I couldn't put it down. So well written, powerful and emotional. I think its one of those books I will re read, which is something I almost never do.
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