Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., is the woman who has transformed the way the world thinks about death and dying. Beginning with the groundbreaking publication of the classic psychological study On Death and Dying, through her many books and her years working with terminally ill children, AIDS patients and the elderly, Kubler-Ross has brought comfort and understanding to millions coping with their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones. Now, facing her...

A haunting meditation on mortality, grief, and loss. Perhaps no one but Kay Redfield Jamison--who combines the acute perceptions of a psychologist with a writerly elegance and passion--could bring such a delicate touch to the subject of losing a spouse to cancer. She looks back at her relationship with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a renowned scientist who battled dyslexia to become one of the foremost experts on schizophrenia. And with her characteristic...

"The Old Man and The Cat is a story of how Nils Uddenberg, retired Professor of Psychology became a beloved cat-owner even though he had never wanted a pet of any kind. One winter morning the author discovered a cat--whom he would later find was homeless--sitting outside his bedroom window, staring at him with big yellow eyes. Slowly but surely the cat worked itself into his life.This award-winning writer who has a background in psychology could not...

"An authoritative, illuminating and deeply humane history of addiction -- by a therapist who has reached the depths of addiction himself. Even in the midst of a period of staggering drug abuse that we can confidently call a crisis, questions about the fundamental nature of addiction, its origins, and its ideal treatments abound. This absence of consensus is the latest plotted point on a centuries-old historical arc: as humans have struggled to define,...

"Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom puts himself on the couch in a lapidary memoir Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself. He opens his story with a nightmare: He is twelve, and is riding his bike past the home of an acne-scarred girl. Like every morning, he calls out, hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in his...

"We speak of doctors most often as heroes, martyrs, or victims. Drawing from forty years of experience working in an emergency psychiatric ward, Paolo Milone offers a more complex--and more compelling--picture. With prose at once direct and lyrical, he transports us inside Ward 77, where mental illness coexists with the ordinary lives of those who, at the end of their shifts, take their white coats off and have to remember to buy milk. In this unsettling,...