Collection of true stories of people who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1976.

Dr. Gabriella Mondini, a strong-willed, young Venetian woman, has followed her father in the path of medicine. She possesses a singleminded passion for the art of physick, even though, in 1590, the male-dominated establishment is reluctant to accept a woman doctor. So when her father disappears on a mysterious journey, Gabriella's own status in the Venetian medical society is threatened. Her father has left clues -- beautiful, thoughtful, sometimes torrid, and often enigmatic letters from his travels as he researches his vast encyclopedia, The Book of Diseases. After ten years of missing his kindness, insight, and guidance, Gabriella decides to set off on a quest to find him -- a daunting journey that will take her through great university cities, centers of medicine, and remote villages across Europe. Despite setbacks, wary strangers, and the menaces of the road, the young doctor bravely follows the clues to her lost father, all while taking notes on maladies and treating the ill to supplement her own work. Gorgeous and brilliantly written, and filled with details about science, medicine, food, and madness, The Book of Madness and Cures is an unforgettable debut.

"Madness can afford the individual certain resources and abilities that are not available to others. The fantasy life, free flight of ideas, distortions of reality, and heightened senses . . . offer a unique perspective on the world." —From the Introduction Why do some extraordinary individuals overcome mental anguish and produce brilliant creative artistry that is often enhanced by their madness? New York Times best-selling author and noted psychologist Jeffrey Kottler explores this fascinating question in Divine Madness. His book is filled with the compelling stories of emotional turmoil that many great artists have undergone as they struggle for success and survival. Jeffrey Kottler writes about the dramatic and tragic lives of cultural icons Sylvia Plath, Judy Garland, Mark Rothko, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charles Mingus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce, and Brian Wilson. In this riveting book, Kottler highlights the personal story of each of these extraordinary individuals and analyzes how they struggled to overcome their emotional hardships. Divine Madness clearly differentiates between those who surrendered to their illness, often taking their own lives, and those who managed to endure and even recover. Kottler details how their profound psychological issues affected their lives and work, their great productivity and success, and how they strove to achieve some kind of personal stability. The fascinating and brilliantly told stories in Divine Madness help us to find meaning in the incredible lives of these artists. They also serve as an inspiration for those who are grappling to rise above their own challenges and limitations and express themselves more productively and creatively.

The true story based on the diaries of murderer Michel Oros. Originally, after the fatal shootout with Oros at Teslin Lake, I had no intention of writing this book. In fact, when Garry Rodgers and I sat in the Skeena Pub after he got back and discussed the details of his experience, the very idea that someone might write the story - glorifying Oros, sensationalizing the murders and trivializing Mike Buday's death - was repugnant. Black and white reprint.

Reprint. Originally published: London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.

This book is ideal for the thousands of teachers who entered the profession in the last ten years and taught prescribed curriculum geared toward end of year bubble testing. Its intent is to empower districts and their teachers to create their own (free!) curriculum that will exceed the expectations of Common Core assessments, as well as create life-long learners that are college and career ready. By employing inquiry based units of study that insist on the use of iconic literature at the center, students will be more prepared for what awaits them with Common Core exams.

Rose and Michael are good students with bright futures. They are also in love. But when Rose gets pregnant, her behavior becomes increasingly strange as she pulls away from her best friend, and from Michael, while she struggles to cope with her predicament. Rose cannot admit that she is pregnant (“If I say it, it will come to be true.”). She moves from denial to ineptly trying to terminate her pregnancy, to believing that she has miscarried, while deep inside, she is on a mental and emotional downward spiral. Meanwhile, Michael, in his confusion, desperation to help and fear of the wrath of his controlling father, sinks into his own kind of small madness. Inspired by the story of two teens in the US who were arrested for hiding the girl’s pregnancy and later disposing of the baby, Touchell says, “When I saw them on TV I was amazed to see they looked like normal kids. They were from good families; they just looked destroyed... . I thought, there’s more than one victim here; what went on with these kids and why did they think they had no one to go to?” This is a moving and powerfully written novel told from the alternating viewpoints of Rose and Michael with compassion and a gentle touch. It is an honest, unflinching look at the complex world of young readers.

Hu Feng, the ‘counterrevolutionary’ leader of a banned literary school, spent twenty-five years in the Chinese Communist Party’s prison system. But back in the Party’s early days, he was one of its best known literary theoreticians and critics—at least until factional infighting, and his short fuse, made him persona non grata among the establishment. His wife, Mei Zhi, shared his incarceration for many years. F is her account of that time, beginning ten years after her and Hu Feng’s initial arrest. She herself was eventually released, after which she navigated the party’s Byzantine prison bureaucracy searching for his whereabouts. Having finally found him, she voluntarily returned to gaol to care for him in his rage and suffering, watching his descent into madness as the excesses of the Cultural Revolution took their toll. Both an intimate portrait of Mei Zhi’s life with Hu Feng and a stark account of the prison system and life under Mao, F is at once beautiful and harrowing. With support from English PEN This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas. For more information visit www.englishpen.org.

John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness, written in 1810, occupies a special place in psychiatric history, it was the first book-length account of one single psychiatric case written by a British psychiatrist. John Haslam, apothecary to London’s Bethlem Hospital, and a leading psychiatrist of the early-nineteenth century, details the case of James Tilly Matthews, who had been a patient in the hospital for some ten years. Matthews claimed he was sane, as did his friends and certain doctors. Haslam, on behalf of the Bethlem authorities, contended he was insane, and attempted to demonstrate this by presenting a detailed account of Matthew’s own delusional system, as far as possible in Matthew’s own words. Originally published in 1988 as part of the Tavistock Classics in the History of Psychiatry series, Roy Porter’s Introduction to this facsimile reprint of an historic book goes beyond Haslam’s text to reveal the extraordinary psychiatric politics surrounding Matthew’s confinement and the court case it produced, leading up to Haslam’s dismissal from his post. Still relevant today, Haslam’s account can be used as material upon which to base a modern diagnosis of Matthew’s disorder.