May: Celebrations and Acknowledgements of Many Communities

There aren’t enough days, much less months, in a year to celebrate and acknowledge the many important communities, cultures, and topics in our diverse world. Because of that, a series that is dedicated to only one or two booklists per month will often have to disregard several important topics. But 2023 is shaping up to be a great year in publishing for new work and diverse perspectives, and May happens to be the convergence of three important, month-long observances that deserve acknowledgment, so we're making space in this post for all three topics: Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month; Jewish American Heritage Month; and Mental Health Awareness Month. Below, you’ll find a booklist of 2023’s new or soon-to-be-published books relevant to each topic. 

As always, if you have any other new books you’d like to recommend to add to the lists, please email us. 

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Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month 

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Brandy Nālani McDougall, University of Arizona Press 

Poetry that seeks environmental justice and honors motherhood and the land of Hawai?i 

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. ‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures. 
 
The poems in Āina Hānau / Birth Land cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people. The ongoing environmental crisis in Hawaiʻi, inextricably linked to colonialism and tourism, is captured with stark intensity as McDougall writes, Violence is what we settle for / because we’ve been led to believe / green paper can feed us / more than green land. The experiences of birth, motherhood, miscarriage, and the power of Native Hawaiian traditions and self-advocacy in an often dismissive medical system is powerfully narrated by the speaker of the titular poem, written for McDougall’s daughters. 
 
‘Āina Hānau reflects on what it means to be from and belong to an ʻāina hānau, as well as what it means to be an ‘āina hānau, as all mothers serve as the first birth lands for their children. 

Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America by Julia Lee, Henry Holt & Company 

In the vein of Eloquent Rage and Minor Feelings—a passionate, no-holds-barred memoir about the Asian American experience in a nation defined by racial stratification 

When Julia Lee was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she? 
 
This question would follow Julia for years to come, resurfacing as she traded in her tumultuous childhood for the white upper echelon of elite academia. It was only when she began a PhD in English that she found answers—not in the Brontës or Austen, as Julia had planned, but rather in the brilliant prose of writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Their works gave Julia the vocabulary and, more important, the permission to critically examine her own tortured position as an Asian American, setting off a powerful journey of racial reckoning, atonement, and self-discovery that has shaped her adult life. 
 
With prose by turns scathing and heart-wrenching, Julia Lee lays bare the complex disorientation and shame that stems from this country’s imposed racial hierarchy to argue that Asian Americans must leverage their liminality for lasting social change alongside Black and brown communities. 

Island Wisdom: Hawaiian Traditions and Practices for a Meaningful Life by Kainoa Daines and Annie Daly, Chronicle Prism 

ALOHA (love) • 'ĀINA (land) • MO'OLELO (stories) • 'OHANA (family) 
DISCOVER FOUR FOUNDATIONS OF HAWAIIAN LIVING 
FOR A PEACEFUL AND BALANCED LIFE. 

 
More than just a beautiful paradise, Hawai'i has a rich culture, deeply rooted in tradition. Native Hawaiian and cultural expert Kainoa Daines has spent many years teaching visitors to the islands about this time-honored wisdom, and now he has teamed up with journalist Annie Daly to share that knowledge with you. Island Wisdom is an inspirational and rewarding journey through traditional Hawaiian teachings that have stood the test of time, from how to be pono (live a balanced life) to how to mālama 'āina (preserve and protect the land). Filled with the voices and guidance of Hawaiian elders, regional folklore, and ancient teachings—plus gorgeous local photography and illustrations throughout—Island Wisdom is a celebration of Hawaiian culture, language, and values that will give you a deeper understanding, appreciation, and respect for Hawai'i and the Hawaiian way of life. 

A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung, Ecco Press 

From the bestselling author of All You Can Ever Know comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost. 

In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d once hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them. 

When Nicole Chung graduated from high school, she couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast and no longer the only Korean she knew, she found a sense of community she had always craved as an Asian American adoptee—and a path to the life she’d long wanted. 

But the middle-class world she begins to raise a family in—where there are big homes and college funds—looks very different from the middle-class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week and there are no safety nets. When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by the kidney disease that took the life of his mother before him, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of financial instability and lack of access to health care contributed to his premature death. And then the unthinkable happens—less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID descends upon the world. 

Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another—and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and tragic inequalities in American society. 

When the Hibiscus Falls by M. Evelina Galang, Coffee House Press 

Seventeen stories traverse borderlines, mythic and real, in the lives of Filipino and Filipino American women and their ancestors. 

Moving from small Philippine villages of the past to the hurricane-beaten coast of near-future Florida, When the Hibiscus Falls examines the triumphs and sorrows that connect generations of women. Daughters, sisters, mothers, aunties, cousins, and lolas commune with their ancestors and their descendants, mourning what is lost when an older generation dies, celebrating what is gained when we safeguard their legacy for those who come after us. Featuring figures familiar from M. Evelina Galang’s other acclaimed and richly imagined novels and stories, When the Hibiscus Falls dwells within the complexity of family, community, and Filipino American identity. Each story is an offering, a bloom that unfurls its petals and holds space in the sun. 

IN-PERSON EVENT at Boswell Books, July 18 at 6:30pm | Beth Nguyen, author of Owner of a Lonely Heart: A Memoir

UW-Madison Professor of English and American Book Award winner Beth Nguyen, author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, visits Boswell with her new memoir about her relationship with her mother, whom she didn't meet until she was twenty—their lives split by the Vietnam War, which left her mother in Saigon while Nguyen and her father became Vietnamese refugees in America. 

Register to attend.  

VIRTUAL EVENT through Boswell Books, June 21 at 2pm | Susie Luo, author of Paper Names, in conversation with Daniel Goldin and Lisa Baudoin

Readings from Oconomowaukee presents its June edition featuring Susie Luo, author of Paper Names, a thoughtful and page-turning novel about the American Dream as seen through the life of a Chinese-American family in New York. 

Register to watch.  

Jewish American Heritage Month 

The 12th Commandment by Daniel Torday, St. Martin's Press

Two-time National Jewish Book Award winner Daniel Torday's haunting new novel about murder, memory, and an ancient cult of Jewish mystics in the rural Midwest. 

The Dönme sect—a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots—lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land. 
But the brutal murder of Natan’s teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil. 
 
When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law—with dangerous implications for his body and his soul. 
 
Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, The 12th Commandment is a brilliant novel by award-winning author Daniel Torday. 

Atomic Anna by Rachel Barenbaum, Grand Central Publishing

Three brilliant women. 
Two life-changing mistakes. 
One chance to reset the future. 
 
In 1986, renowned nuclear scientist, Anna Berkova, is sleeping in her bed in the Soviet Union when Chernobyl’s reactor melts down. It’s the exact moment she tears through time—and it’s an accident. When she opens her eyes, she’s landed in 1992 only to discover Molly, her estranged daughter, shot in the chest. Molly, with her dying breath, begs Anna to go back in time and stop the disaster, to save Molly’s daughter Raisa, and put their family’s future on a better path. 
 
In ‘60s Philadelphia, Molly is coming of age as an adopted refusenik. Her family is full of secrets and a past they won’t share. She finds solace in comic books, drawing her own series, Atomic Anna, and she’s determined to make it as an artist. When she meets the volatile, charismatic Viktor, their romance sets her life on a very different course. 
 
In the ‘80s, Raisa, is a lonely teen and math prodigy, until a quiet, handsome boy moves in across the street and an odd old woman shows up claiming to be her biological grandmother. As Raisa finds new issues of Atomic Anna in unexpected places, she notices each comic challenges her to solve equations leading to one impossible conclusion: time travel. And she finally understands what she has to do. 
 
As these remarkable women work together to prevent the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century, they grapple with the power their discoveries hold. Just because you can change the past, does it mean you should? 

Code Name Sapphire by Pam Jenoff, Park Row

A woman must rescue her cousin's family from a train bound for Auschwitz in this riveting tale of bravery and resistance, from the bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris 
 
1942. Hannah Martel has narrowly escaped Nazi Germany after her fiancé was killed in a pogrom. When her ship bound for America is turned away at port, she has nowhere to go but to her cousin Lily, who lives with her family in Brussels. Fearful for her life, Hannah is desperate to get out of occupied Europe. But with no safe way to leave, she must return to the dangerous underground work she thought she had left behind. 
 
Seeking help, Hannah joins the Sapphire Line, a secret resistance network led by a mysterious woman named Micheline and her enigmatic brother Matteo. But when a grave mistake causes Lily’s family to be arrested and slated for deportation to Auschwitz, Hannah finds herself torn between her loyalties. How much is Hannah willing to sacrifice to save the people she loves? 
 
Inspired by incredible true stories of courage and sacrifice, Code Name Sapphire is a powerful novel about love, family and the unshakable resilience of women in even the hardest of times. 

The Future by Naomi Alderman, Simon & Schuster 

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Power comes a white-knuckle tour de force and dazzling exploration of the world we have made and where we are going.

The Future—as the richest people on the planet have discovered—is where the money is.

The Future is a few billionaires leading the world to destruction while safeguarding their own survival with secret lavish bunkers.

The Future is private weather, technological prophecy and highly deniable weapons.

The Future is a handful of friends—the daughter of a cult leader, a non-binary hacker, an ousted Silicon Valley visionary, the concerned wife of a dangerous CEO, and an internet-famous survivalist—hatching a daring plan. It could be the greatest heist ever. Or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

The Future is what you see if you don’t look behind you.

The Future is the only reason to do anything, the only object of desire.

The Future is here.

Sam: A Novel by Allegra Goodman, The Dial Press 

“There is a girl, and her name is Sam.” So begins Allegra Goodman’s moving and wise new novel. 
 
Sam is seven years old and living in Beverly, Massachusetts. She adores her father, though he isn’t around much. Her mother struggles to make ends meet, and never fails to remind Sam that if she studies hard and acts responsibly, adulthood will be easier—more secure and comfortable. But comfort and security are of little interest to Sam. She doesn’t fit in at school, where the other girls have the right shade of blue jeans and don’t question the rules. She doesn’t care about jeans or rules. All she wants to climb. Hanging from the highest limbs of the tallest trees, scaling the side of a building, Sam feels free. 
 
As a teenager, Sam begins to doubt herself. She yearns to be noticed, even as she wants to disappear. When her climbing coach takes an interest in her, his attention is more complicated than she anticipated. She resents her father’s erratic behavior, but she grieves after he’s gone. And she resists her mother’s attempts to plan for her future, even as that future draws closer. 
 
The simplicity of this tender, emotionally honest novel is what makes it so powerful. Sam by Allegra Goodman will break your heart, but will also leave you full of hope. 

Zelda Popkin: The Life and Times of an American Jewish Woman Writer by Jeremy D. Popkin, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers  

This book is about Zelda Popkin who lived and wrote through all the great changes of American Jewish women's lives in the 20th century: the reaction against religious tradition, women’s emancipation, struggles against antisemitism, the impact of the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, and the upsurge of Jewish identity in the 1960s. 
 
Zelda Popkin’s adventurous life could have made her the protagonist of one of her own novels. In his brilliant telling of the story of her life, her historian grandson, Jeremy D. Popkin, has made a singular contribution to the history of American Jewish women in the twentieth century. From the 1920s when she worked in the highly competitive and male-dominated public relations business to her rise as a million selling author of popular fiction beginning in the 1940s, including some of the earliest fiction on the Holocaust and the state of Israel, Zelda’s life and work documented the rise of American Jewish women. Popkin uses Zelda’s experience to bring to life a larger story of American Jews and American women in the twentieth century, with the vividness that comes from having a lively character at its center. At the same time, this will also be a story about a woman whose powerful personality profoundly influenced several generations of a family. Popkin makes the case that even if she sometimes burnished her stories to create what he calls “legends of Zelda,” she was one of the most articulate female members of the generation of Jews who fought their way into the American middle class during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Zelda’s life is a rich source of evidence about the experience of American Jewish women and offers perspectives that are frequently at odds with analyses based on men’s lives. The story of Zelda, her generation, and its rich and significant legacy will create a compelling portrait and detailed tapestry of an iconic woman and her time. 

ADDITIONAL BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS | Browse recommendations from The Association of Jewish Libraries on Bookshop.org. 

The Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic libarianship, is an international professional organization that fosters access to information and research in all forms of media relating to all things Jewish. The Association promotes Jewish literacy and scholarship and provides a community for peer support and professional development. JewishLibraries.org. 

Mental Health Awareness Month 

Advanced Parenting: Advice for Helping Kids Through Diagnoses, Differences, and Mental Health Challenges by Kelly Fradin, Balance 

“An invaluable resource for parents and caregivers,” this important, empathetic guidebook offers practical steps for managing children's health (Emily Oster, PhD,  New York Times bestselling author of Cribsheet and Expecting Better). 
 
Any parent who has ever walked out of a concerning appointment with their child's doctor or teacher has experienced a heady mix of emotions--fear, love, confusion, concern, sadness, and perhaps even anger. While every parent hopes for a healthy child, the reality is that children face many common challenges, including medical issues like ADHD, asthma, food allergies, feeding issues, learning disabilities, anxiety and depression, and developmental delays, throughout their formative years. As the role of a parent becomes one of a caregiver, it can be overwhelming for parents and children alike, particularly if money, time, access, or any combination of those are in short supply.  
 
As a balm, Dr. Kelly Fradin offers Advanced Parenting, based on her experience as a complex-care pediatrician. In this crucial guide, parents will find empathy and support as well as evidence-based practical guidance. Of greatest import is the need for tools with which to manage the emotional stress that comes from having a child who deviates from the norm, as well as coping with uncertainty and navigating the business of care. Readers will discover ways to optimize the outcomes for their family and make their day-to-day life easier. 
 
Advanced Parenting will help families from the beginning of their journey, helping parents to decide when a child needs help, accepting the implications of a challenge, obtaining a correct diagnosis, learning about the issue, building a treatment team and coming up with a comprehensive plan. Dr. Fradin explores how a child struggling can affect the entire family dynamic including the parent’s relationships and the siblings overall well-being, and with her experience as a complex care pediatrician, she will help parents avoid common mistakes. Parents will feel seen, supported, and better prepared to be both a parent and a caregiver. 

Dismissed: Tackling the Biases That Undermine our Health Care by Angela Marshall and Kathy Palokoff, Citadel 

Here's the uncomfortable truth: Race, gender, sexual orientation, age, body size, income, and other cultural factors have a significant bearing on whether you will be diagnosed and treated correctly. The good news is regardless of whether you are a patient, healthcare provider, or administrator, there are steps you can take today to combat medical bias. 
 
The only book on this subject written by a primary care doctor who is a woman of color, DISMISSED examines all forms of bias – those related to race and ethnicity, gender identity and sexual orientation, age, disabilities, obesity, and the increasing bias against science – instructing patients, doctors, and administrators alike on how we can all identify bias – and how we can all do better. 
 
Health-care providers and their patients are human, and all humans have unconscious biases that affect how we listen, observe, and act. Bias impacts patients when they are at their most vulnerable. Health-care bias can mean the difference not just between suffering and relief, but between life and death. 
 
For the first time, an author with the unique perspective of being one of America’s top doctors, a woman, and Black, candidly addresses the issue of bias in health care, sharing personal and patient stories and pragmatic solutions. Dr. Angela Marshall, repeatedly named a “Top Doctor” by Washingtonian magazine, draws on extensive research, poignant stories from some of the thousands of patients she has treated, and her own compelling personal experience, to examine the bias from both patients’ and health‑care providers’ points of view. She offers a bold blueprint for change, filled with fresh solutions that can help everyone in our health-care system. 
 
Dismissed not only explains what so many people feel so profoundly—that the system is working against them. It also reveals what health-care practitioners, patients, and society in general can do to make it right. 

Fulfilled: 52 Prescriptions for Healing, Health, and Happiness by Bernadette Anderson, Woodhall Press 

Fulfilled. 52 Prescriptions for Healing, Health, and Happiness is your at-home or on-the-go personal office visit––without the co-pay and expensive bill, and is available to you 24-7. Each week Dr. Bernadette asks questions, discusses symptoms and issues, then provides a "Prescription" worksheet to help you achieve healing, health, and happiness. With this engaging wellness guide, she is your doctor on call. Just open the book and she's right there with life-changing tools and insights to help make "living the life you were born to live" your natural default.You don't have to do it alone 

Dr. Bernadette didn't only write Fulfilled. 52 Prescriptions for Healing, Health, and Happiness, she lived it. Each prescriptive weekly guide is a part of her personal story because every "Prescription" has been doctor-tested by her! And, some of them are a playback of select conversations with patients in pursuit of their best lives. It's a real-life, 100% achievable guide. 

The Long Grief Journey: How Long-Term Unresolved Grief Can Affect Your Mental Health and What to Do About It by Pamela Blair and Bradie McCabe Hansen, Sourcebooks 

Providing actionable advice on learning to live without a loved one and working through grief, this book challenges the idea that the grieving need to just “get over” their loss 

There is an idea in Western society that grieving for a loved one should only last six months to a year. But those who have felt this loss know that the grieving process continues silently for much longer. This book is for the people who have experienced loss and who by all appearances seem to have “moved on”—but internally they bear the sometimes-crippling weight of sadness and longing for their loved one. 

Written by grief experts, The Long Grief Journey is a much-needed resource that includes exercises, journal prompts, and introduces rituals that aid the bereaved as they learn to live with loss. 

Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health by Micha Frazer-Carroll, Pluto Press 

It's time to reclaim our mental health! 

Mental health affects us all, and yet it remains elusive as a concept. 

Does getting a diagnosis help or hinder it? How is mental well-being, which is often incredibly personal, driven by widespread societal suffering? Can it be a social construct and real at the same time? 

These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be a political issue that needs deeper understanding beyond today’s 'awareness raising' campaigns. 

Exploring the history of asylums and psychiatry; the relationship between disability and broader liberation movements; alternative models of care; the relationship between art and mental health; law and the decarceration of mental health, Mad World is a radical and hopeful antidote to pathologization, gatekeeping and the policing of imagination. 

The Mind and the Moon: My Brother's Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches by Daniel Bergner, Ecco Press 

An important—and intimate—interrogation of how we treat mental illness and how we understand ourselves 

In the early 1960s, JFK declared that science would take us to the moon. He also declared that science would make the “remote reaches of the mind accessible” and cure psychiatric illness with breakthrough medications. We were walking on the moon within the decade. But today, psychiatric cures continue to elude us—as does the mind itself. Why is it that we still don’t understand how the mind works? What is the difference between the mind and the brain? And given all that we still don’t know, how can we make insightful, transformative choices about our psychiatric conditions? 

When Daniel Bergner’s younger brother was diagnosed as bipolar and put on a locked ward in the 1980s, psychiatry seemed to have achieved what JFK promised: a revolution of chemical solutions to treat mental illness. Yet as Bergner’s brother was deemed a dire risk for suicide and he and his family were told his disorder would be lifelong, he found himself taking heavy doses of medications with devastating side effects. 

Now, in recounting his brother’s journey alongside the gripping, illuminating stories of Caroline, who is beset by the hallucinations of psychosis, and David, who is overtaken by depression, Bergner examines the evolution of how we treat our psyches. He reveals how the pharmaceutical industry has perpetuated our biological view of the mind and our drug-based assumptions about treatment—despite the shocking price paid by many patients and the problematic evidence of drug efficacy. And he takes us into the pioneering labs of today’s preeminent neuroscientists, sharing their remarkably candid reflections and fascinating new theories of treatment. 

The Mind and the Moon raises profound questions about how we understand ourselves and the essential human divide between our brains and our minds. This is a book of thought-provoking reframings, delving into the science—and spirit—of our psyches. It is about vulnerability and personal dignity, the terrifying choices confronted by families and patients, and the prospect of alternatives. In The Mind and the Moon, Bergner beautifully explores how to seek a deeper engagement with ourselves and one another—and how to find a better path toward caring for our minds. 

Racial Wellness: A Guide to Liberatory Healing for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color by Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah, Clarkson Potter 

A guide and workbook centered on self-care, healing, and empowerment for Black, Indigenous, and people of color--from racial wellness visionary and designer Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah.

As a society, we rarely talk about how racism affects the holistic health of Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Author and healing-informed designer Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah refers to racism as "the multifaceted abuser" because of the ways it affects the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing of BIPOC. Whether these communities are experiencing microaggressions or overt racism, they are constantly forced to practice resistance. Using her background in social welfare and interaction design, Iyamah seeks to stimulate revolutionary healing for communities of color, shifting the conversation from racial trauma to racial wellness.

This powerful book helps BIPOC understand, reflect, and cope with racial trauma. Divided into five sections--emotional wellness, mental wellness, physical wellness, spiritual wellness, and our interconnected wellness--Iyamah lends readers a gentle hand on their journey toward racial wellness by providing ways to heal on individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels, while encouraging deeper reflection through insightful journal prompts. Filled with uplifting affirmations, tender reminders, love letters, and helpful graphics sprinkled throughout, Racial Wellness is as informative as it is comforting, offering communities of color the opportunity to rest, rehabilitate, and rebuild.

Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Jacquelyn Ogorchukwu Iyamah, Doubleday 

Why do kids born in the summer get diagnosed more often with A.D.H.D.? How are marathons harmful for your health, even when you're not running? What do surgeons and salesmen have in common? Which annual event made people 30 percent more likely to get COVID-19? 
 
As a University of Chicago–trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Jena is uniquely equipped to answer these questions. And as a critical care doctor at Massachusetts General who researches health care policy, Christopher Worsham confronts their impact on the hospital’s sickest patients. In this singular work of science and medicine, Jena and Worsham show us how medicine really works, and its effect on all of us. 
 
Relying on ingeniously devised natural experiments—random events that unknowingly turn us into experimental subjects—Jena and Worsham do more than offer readers colorful stories. They help us see the way our health is shaped by forces invisible to the untrained eye. Is there ever a good time to have a heart attack? Do you choose the veteran doctor or the rookie?  Do you really need the surgery your doctor recommends? These questions are rife with significance; their impact can be life changing. Addressing them in a style that’s both animated and enlightening, Random Acts of Medicine empowers you to see past the white coat and find out what really makes medicine work—and how it could work better. 

The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor's Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age by Gladys McGarey, Atria Books 

Dr. Gladys McGarey, a centenarian still-practicing doctor and the mother of holistic medicine, reveals her powerful and life-changing secrets for how to live with joy, vitality, and purpose at any age. 
 
Dr. Gladys McGarey, cofounder of the American Holistic Medical Association, began her medical practice at a time when women couldn’t even own their own bank accounts. Over the past sixty years, she has pioneered a new way of thinking about disease and health that has transformed the way we imagine health care and self-care around the world. 
 
On these pages, Dr. McGarey shares her six actionable secrets to enjoying lives that are long, happy, and purpose-driven: 
 
-Spend your energy wildly: How to embrace your life fully and feel motivated every day. 
-All life needs to move: How to move—spiritually, mentally, and physically—to help let go of trauma and other roadblocks. 
-You are here for a reason: How to find the everyday “juice” that helps you stay oriented in your life’s purpose. 
-You are never alone: How to build a community that’s meaningful to you. 
-Everything is your teacher: Discover the deep learnings that come from pain and setbacks. 
-Love is the most powerful medicine: Learn to love yourself—and others—into healing. 
 
In a voice that is both practical and inspiring, Dr. McGarey shares her own extraordinary stories and eternal wisdom—from her early childhood in India and a chance encounter with Mahatma Gandhi to her life as a physician and a mother of six, to her survival of both heartbreak and illness. And she doesn’t just look backwards, she looks forward. At over a hundred years old, Dr. McGarey has an inspiring plan for a healthier and more joyful future for all. 

PODCAST | The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) released a supplemental podcast to their bestselling book You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health by NAMI Chief Medical Officer Ken Duckworth, M.D. The podcast series adapts the 100+ mental health stories of those interviewed for the book. New episodes are released every Thursday. 

If you’d like to order any of these books in bulk to share with your business, organization, book club, or anything else, you can order them from us! Ordering online is fast and easy (and often discounted).