On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven-year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist, experienced a massive stroke when a blood vessel exploded in the left side of her brain. A neuroanatomist by profession, she observed her own mind completely deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life, all within the space of four brief hours. As the damaged left side of her brain--the...

"Five months pregnant, on a flight to their "babymoon," Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange, and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave--a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident--had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting to hear if her husband...

Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. When Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks for the first and last time since his stroke, he says that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson-each occurring at different times of his life. Rudy is all too ready to discount...

Sometimes you have to break a family to fix it. From New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins, a new novel examining a family at the breaking point in all its messy, difficult, wonderful complexity. The Frosts are a typical American family. Barb and John, married almost fifty years, are testy and bored with each other ... who could blame them after all this time? At least they have their daughters—Barb's favorite, the perfect, brilliant...

Lawrence Wetherhold is a recently widowed literature professor who is a numb and chilly intellectual. He rebuffs his students, ignores his own teenage children, James and Vanessa, and spurns cries for financial assistance from his ne'er-do-well but rather soulful adopted brother, Chuck. After an accident and Lawrence goes to the hospital, he is deprived of the right to drive. Janet is a physician and former student of Lawrence who remembers her disappointment...

"Every juncture in Jon Kerstetter's life has been marked by a crossing from one world into another: from civilian to doctor to soldier; between healing and waging war; and between compassion and hatred of the enemy. When an injury led to a stroke that ended his careers as a doctor and a soldier, he faced the most difficult crossing of all, a recovery that proved as shattering as war itself. Crossings is a memoir of an improbable, powerfully drawn...