Julie Rehmeyer felt like she was going to the desert to die. Julie fully expected to be breathing at the end of the trip―but driving into Death Valley felt like giving up, surrendering. She’d spent years battling a mysterious illness so extreme that she often couldn’t turn over in her bed. The top specialists in the world were powerless to help, and research on her disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, was at a near standstill. Having exhausted the plausible ideas, Julie turned to an implausible one. Going against both her instincts and her training as a science journalist and mathematician, she followed the advice of strangers she’d met on the Internet. Their theory―that mold in her home and possessions was making her sick―struck her as wacky pseudoscience. But they had recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome as severe as hers. To test the theory that toxic mold was making her sick, Julie drove into the desert alone, leaving behind everything she owned. She wasn’t even certain she was well enough to take care of herself once she was there. She felt stripped not only of the life she’d known, but any future she could imagine. With only her scientific savvy, investigative journalism skills, and dog, Frances, to rely on, Julie carved out her own path to wellness―and uncovered how shocking scientific neglect and misconduct had forced her and millions of others to go it alone. In stunning prose, she describes how her illness transformed her understanding of science, medicine, and spirituality. Through the Shadowlands brings scientific authority to a misunderstood disease and spins an incredible and compelling story of tenacity, resourcefulness, acceptance, and love.

Bad Therapy offers a rare glimpse into the hearts and mind's of the profession's most famous authors, thinkers, and leaders when things aren't going so well. Jeffrey Kottler and Jon Carlson, who include their own therapy mishaps, interview twenty of the world's most famous practitioners who discuss their mistakes, misjudgements, and miscalculations on working with clients. Told through narratives, the failures are related with candor to expose the human side of leading therapists. Each therapist shares with regrets, what they learned from the experience, what others can learn from their mistakes, and the benefits of speaking openly about bad therapy.

"Do you want to hike the Appalachian Trail again?" he asked. Although DP Turner had hiked 1,500 miles of that trail during his adolescent years, that question from an unlikable classmate in high school led to a return forty years later. Thinking he was a hiking expert, Turner would find that a return would be quite different. Turner presents a trek fraught with hardships, beginning with a fall that breaks his ankle nearly two miles from help. And yet a glimmer of hope and wisdom shines through. The trail's culture and path had changed. Backpacking technology had passed by him. But along the way, that unlikable person would become a close friend and hiking partner. Come on a journey on a path full of danger, wonders, and remarkable people with stories needing to be told. Discover how hiking philosophies and generations had changed in four decades. Go on a quest as he tries to finish a forty-mile gap in Virginia that had haunted him all during his adult life. Along the way, he rediscovers personal growth that had lain dormant since his teenage years and what it really means to be ‘Almost There.'"

Originally published in 2010 with the subtitle Epic adventures on the Appalachian Trail.

The 10th Winner of the 2019 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Awarded by Barbara Kingsolver “What a read this is, right from its startling opening scene. But even more than plot, it’s the richly layered details that drive home a lightning bolt of empathy. To read At the Edge of the Haight is to live inside the everyday terror and longings of a world that most of us manage not to see, even if we walk past it on sidewalks every day. At a time when more Americans than ever find themselves at the edge of homelessness, this book couldn’t be more timely.” —Barbara Kingsolver, author of Unsheltered and The Poisonwood Bible Maddy Donaldo, homeless at twenty, lives with her dog and makeshift family in the hidden spaces of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. She thinks she knows how to survive and whom to trust until she accidentally witnesses the murder of a young man. Her world is upended as she has to face not only the killer but also the police and then the victim’s parents, who desperately want Maddy to tell them about the life their son led after he left home. And in a desire to save her since they could not save their own son, they are determined to have Maddy reunite with her own lost family. But what makes a family? Is it the people who raised you if they don’t have the skills to look after you? Is it the foster parents whose generosity only lasts until things become more difficult? Or is it the family that Maddy has met in the park, young people who also have nowhere else to go? Told with sensitivity and tenderness and set against the backdrop of a radically changing city, At the Edge of the Haight is narrated by a young girl just beginning to understand herself. The result is a powerful debut that, much like previous Bellwether winners The Leavers, by Lisa Ko, or Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, grapples with one of the most urgent issues of our day.

Charles Booker is thrilled to start married life in Two Harbors, Minnesota, with his ambitious ornithologist bride, Caroline—but he sabotages his own happiness when, blinded by his desire for a family, he tricks Caroline into a pregnancy she doesn’t want. Caroline, bold and unapologetic, follows her own nature and holds Charles to his promise to parent their daughter without her help—an arrangement that allows her to travel the world and follow her birds, wherever they may take her. This uneasy truce results in near tragedy for their daughter, Grace, who comes of age in a household full of toxic resentment on the one side and suffocating love on the other, and increasingly struggles with her mental health as she grows older. Told by all three of the characters involved and set against the backdrop of Lake Superior, Finding Grace is a piercing chronicle of the struggles and eventual insight gained by each over the years, starting with Charles and Caroline’s courtship and continuing into Grace’s early adulthood—and a poignant coming-of-age journey for both Grace and her parents.

In this probing, intensely personal memoir, the words “Physician, heal thyself” assume a fresh and moving urgency. "Explores wth startling depth and immediacy the question of who shall heal the fallen physician." —Elle “Voices are a soul’s signature,” says psychologist Dan Shapiro, who in his daily practice hears plenty of them. For all his expertise, he admits he’s still terrified that “someone will keep something from me, and when they tell me the truth, I’ll be useless.” Treating other physicians has become one of Shapiro’s specialties. When the obstetrician Amelia Sorvino seeks his help—distraught that her own medical error could have injured a patient’s baby—Shapiro finds his talents as counselor and healer pushed to their limits. Session by session, he works to discover the sources of Amelia’s anguish—for his own sake as much as hers: he’s familiar with the burden of a doctor’s guilt, and he has seen how loss and trauma, if unchecked, can echo from generation to generation in a family.