Archives de catégorie : Memoir

THE FACE LAUGHS WHILE THE BRAIN CRIES de Stephen L. Hauser

A doctor’s powerful and deeply human memoir about the mysteries of the brain and his 40 year quest to find a treatment for multiple sclerosis.

THE FACE LAUGHS WHILE THE BRAIN CRIES:
The Education of a Doctor
by Stephen L. Hauser
‎ St. Martin’s Press, May 2023

Dr. Stephen L. Hauser is an acclaimed physician and neuroimmunologist who has spent his career performing cutting-edge research on multiple sclerosis (MS), a devastating brain disease that affects millions of people worldwide. His work has revolutionized our understanding of the genetic immunology and treatment of MS, and led to the development of B cell therapies―currently the only therapy in place for progressive MS patients.
THE FACE LAUGHS WHILE THE BRAIN CRIES is a riveting memoir that follows Dr. Hauser from his unorthodox upbringing among the colorful cast of characters responsible for his development into a tenacious and innovative researcher, to the life-changing medical breakthroughs he has made against extremely long odds. Along the way, readers will learn the incredible stories of many of his patients, whose bravery, strength, and optimism in the face of a debilitating illness were instrumental to the progress that has been made in the fight against MS. This heartwarming book, written in accessible prose and related with equal measures of humor, empathy, and excitement, is sure to inspire anyone who has faced a daunting challenge.

Stephen L. Hauser, M.D. is the Robert A. Fishman Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Director of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. A neuroimmunologist, his research has advanced our understanding of the genetic basis, immune mechanisms, and treatment of multiple sclerosis. Dr. Hauser has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, the John Dystel Prize and the Charcot Award for Multiple Sclerosis Research, and the Taubman Prize for Excellence in Translational Medical Research.

ALMOST BROWN de Charlotte Gill

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

ALMOST BROWN: A Memoir
by Charlotte Gill
Crown, June 2023

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960’s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.
ALMOST BROWN is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as she finds herself distancing from her father too—why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?—she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. As a mixed-race child, was this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? ALMOST BROWN  looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What are you? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? And how does your relationship with your parents change as you change and grow older?
In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, “diversity,” and the idea of “race,” a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Charlotte Gill is a bestselling and award-winning writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ladykiller, her first book, was the recipient of the Danuta Gleed Award for short fiction. Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir, was a #1 national bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Hazlitt. Gill teaches writing in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College and is the Rogers Communications Chair of Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.

GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR de Haley Weaver

A graphic memoir of one woman’s utterly relatable and life-affirming anxiety journey.

GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR
by Haley Weaver
‎Avery, Spring/Summer 2023
(via Neon Literary)

Through eleven illustrated essays, GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR encourages readers to understand anxiety as a part of them, a neutral thing as unavoidable and intrinsic as any other part of their body. Anxiety isn’t an obstacle, it’s a roommate. Or in Haley Weaver’s case, her anxiety is represented by a wide-eyed tangle of string, Weaver reveals over the course of the book that it isn’t an enemy to defeat or an obstacle to overcome. Anxiety just is, and it’s never going away, but if we care for it with tender curiosity and attention, it has many gifts to offer. With care, practice, and the friendship of some really great coping mechanisms, you can learn how to live with your anxiety roommate in a mutually respectful, affectionate, even meaningful way.
GIVE ME SPACE BUT DON’T GO FAR is more than just a memoir; it’s a valentine to selfacceptance and forgiveness.

Haley Weaver illustrates and shares webcomics about anxiety + mental health, relationships, and selfhood on her Instagram account @HaleyDrewThis. Her illustrations have been featured on other notable accounts and websites, including Bustle, Betches, New York Magazine, and Bored Panda. She has a knack for transforming universal (and sometimes overwhelming) feelings into digestible, relatable illustrations. Since sharing her first doodle to Instagram in 2017, Haley has accrued a fan base of almost 300,000 followers on Instagram.

AUFGEWACHSEN IN DER LETZTEN DIKTATUR EUROPAS de Viktoryia Andrukovič

A strong young woman talks about life in the last remaining European dictatorship. Courage, pain and hope – the struggle for freedom in Belarus.

AUFGEWACHSEN IN DER LETZTEN DIKTATUR EUROPAS
(Grown Up in Europe’s Last Dictatorship)
by Viktoryia Andrukovič
‎ Heyne/PRH Verlagsgruppe, May 2022

Viktoryia Andrukovič, the Belarusian human rights advocate and political activist, was born in 1994, the year that Lukashenko came to power. She knows her homeland only as a country under the yoke of an increasingly autocratic regime, and she spent her deprived and precarious adolescence there hoping for a better, freer future for her country. An opposition activist both before and after the 2020 presidential elections, she now works with Belarusian NGOs in exile.
In this book, she tells her story – the story of the generation of Belarusians who were born and grew up under the dictatorship, a story about fear, persecution and hope, and the story of the fight for a free Belarus, for human rights and democracy in the face of oppression and violence.

Viktoryia Andrukovič, born in 1994, is a Belarusian human rights activist. For many years, she has worked for Belarusian human rights organisations and NGOs promoting democracy, freedom and justice in her home country. She was involved in ZUBR, a platform established to monitor the presidential election process, has helped victims of police violence in Belarus, recorded human rights abuses for the Committee Investigating Torture in Belarus and engaged in protest movements. She currently helps various oppositional Belarusian NGOs in exile with their work.

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VOM GLÜCK, UNTERWEGS ZU SEIN de Christian Schüle

To the ends of the world in search of ourselves; Why we love travelling – and why it’s good for us.

VOM GLÜCK, UNTERWEGS ZU SEIN
(The Joys of Life on the Road)
by Christian Schüle
‎ Siedler/PRH Verlagsgruppe, April 2022

Travelling is simply wonderful – that joyful sensation of heading out into the big wide world to experience the wholly new, that feeling of freedom and openness to accidental encounters… and it’s not least the ideal chance to experience time, the world and yourself differently. Whether it’s the beauty of old pilgrims’ ways in Scandinavia or dark alleyways in Cairo, the effortlessness of the flip-flop-wearing guides to Guatemala’s Atitlán volcano, the dogs dozing idly in the Portuguese sun, nights in Blackpool or Tokyo …
In this book, Christian Schüle – philosopher, traveller, flâneur and hiker – combines his personal experiences exploring the world with reflections on why unfamiliarity and distance are the perfect way to find yourself. VOM GLÜCK, UNTERWEGS ZU SEIN is both a philosophical road trip, and a celebration of meaningful travel.

Christian Schüle, born in 1970, is a philosopher, freelance writer and publisher whose award-winning essays, articles and reportage have appeared among others in Die Zeit and Mare, and on Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandradio and Radio Bavaria. Since 2015 he teaches Culture Studies at the University of the Arts in Berlin. He has published a series of much talked-about and noteworthy essays on topical subjects, including his collection « Deutschlandvermessung » and, most recently, « In der Kampfzone: Deutschland zwischen Panik, Größenwahn und Selbstverzwergung ».