In a culture of comic book heroes, it's gratifying to be reminded that there are real heroes out there. Every day the staff of emergency rooms throughout the world are saving lives - 24/7/365. Dr. Patrick Crocker provides us an intimate glimpse into the growing mind of an emergency physician, from residency to retirement.Told in a unique first-person stream of consciousness style, you are right in the middle of the action, looking over the doctor's shoulder while he works. In this compilation of notable, frightening, funny, sad, and poignant cases, you'll see Dr. Crocker's struggles to Do No Harm in the most challenging of situations. Through these stories, you'll see him find the delicate balance between help and harm, empathy and self-preservation.

Like a latter-day Goya, Sue Coe is driven to create moral works, from stark renditions of slaughterhouse brutality to accounts of abused domestic animals and laboratory testing. In Pit's Letter, a hapless canine describes her desolate life to her only surviving sister. She recounts her puppyhood and upbringing in her human family, her heartless banishment, and finally her suffering and death at the hands of the experimenting scientists at Eden Biotechnology. Ironically, her former master winds up in the same situation: an accidental scratching infects him with a pathogen - and man and beast share the same fate.

Every day, President Obama read ten of the letters he received from citizens across America. Here are ten of those letters, along with President Obama's responses and the stories behind them. The letters come from people of all ages, walks of life, and political points of view. Some are heart­breaking, some angry, some hopeful. Indeed, Obama reads as many letters addressed “Dear Jackass” as “Dear Mr. President.” Eli Saslow, a young and rising star at the Washington Post, became fascinated by the power of these letters and set out to find the stories behind them. Through the lens of ten letters to which Obama responded personally, this exceptionally relevant and poignant book explores those individual stories, taking an in-depth look at the misfortunes, needs, opinions, and, yes, anger over the current state of the country that inspired ten people to put pen to paper. Surprisingly, what also emerges from these affecting personal narratives is a story about the astounding endurance and optimism of the American people. Ten Letters is an inspiring and important book about ordi­nary people and the issues they face every day—the very issues that are shaping America’s future. This is not an insider Washington book by any means, but a book for the times that tells the real American stories of today.

As a missionary in the Sudan, amid unrest and war following Sudanese independence, Nikkel wrote these quasi-public letters -- missionary epistles --to his friends and supporters back home in the USA. These letters present a vivid picture of daily struggle in an impoverished, war-torn, but lavishly beautiful country.

In the late 1970s the Emerson Rose Asylum became completely abandoned - all the patients, doctors, staff vanished and were never seen again. The events circling this mass exodus have been one of the most baffling disappearances in history...until now. For hidden deep inside a tattered asylum mattress a stack of bundled letters were found. These letters, all addressed to the pseudonym Dr. Quill, and all written by the patients as they document the final days of the Emerson Rose Asylum.

Standing in the trauma room of an emergency department is like standing at ground zero of a nuclear reaction, only it's not radiation that is released-but stories. Stories that are told and retold, sometimes just until the end of the shift, but sometimes for decades. A survivor of domestic violence makes it to the hospital but cannot trust anyone. An anonymous man passes away after being taken to the emergency room, and no one can identify him. The spouse of a cancer patient must decide whether to force her to undergo chemotherapy or to let her pass away in peace. These stories-and all the rest in People of the ER-grapple with what it means to be human in the face of trauma and death. Written by the author of Trauma Room Two, People of the ER, delves deeper into the lives of the patients and staff that work in a small, rural emergency room.