In Fact Books

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  Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness

  Patrick J. Kennedy, Lee Gutkind, and Karen Wolk Feinstein

  20 fascinating journeys through madness. What do you do when your father kills himself, or your mother is committed to a psych ward, or your daughter starts hearing voices telling her to harm herself—or when you yourself hear such voices?

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  Oh Baby! True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love

  Lee Gutkind, Alice Bradley, and Lisa Belkin

  In these 23 original stories, mothers and fathers from all walks of life–straight, gay, single, surrogate, biological, adoptive–explore the challenges and rewards of parenthood. Here, among other adventures, they fall hopelessly in love with newborns, secretly fear having made huge mistakes, race to finish birthing at home before the paramedics arrive, struggle with the bureaucracy of international adoption, despair of ever getting a one-year-old to nap, are nearly broken by colic, encounter other judge-y parents in birthing class, learn how to parent children with special needs, and more.

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  Same Time Next Week: True Stories of Working Through Mental Illness

  Lee Gutkind, Karen Wolk Feinstein, and Peter D. Kramer

  In any given year, one in four Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness–and yet there is still a significant stigma attached to being labeled as “mentally ill.” We hear about worse-case scenarios, but in many–maybe even most–cases, there is much room for hope.

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  True Stories, Well Told: From the First 20 Years of Creative Nonfiction Magazine

  Lee Gutkind

  Creative nonfiction is the literary equivalent of jazz: it’s a rich mix of flavors, ideas, voices, and techniques—some newly invented, and others as old as writing itself. This collection of 20 gripping, beautifully-written nonfiction narratives is the best of the best from CNF. Contributions by Toi Derricotte, Brian Doyle, Carolyn Forché, Caitlin Horrocks, Harrison Scott Key, and others draw inspiration from topics ranging from butterflies to baseball, and from sustainable farming to fatherhood. Their unforgettable stories shed light on how we live.

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  Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly

  Lee Gutkind, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Dorothy Allison

  In the steamy South, temptation is as wild and plentiful as kudzu. Whether the sin in question is skinny-dipping or becoming an unlikely porn star, running rum or renting out a room to a pair of exhibitionistic adulterers, in these true stories women defy tradition and forge their own paths through life—often learning unexpected lessons from the experience.

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  True Crime: Real-Life Stories of Abduction, Addiction, Obsession, Murder, Grave-Robbing, and More

  Lee Gutkind

  In these pages, a magazine intern, kidnapped and brutalized by her ex-boyfriend, struggles to live free from fear; an identity thief encounters a prison guard who knows her better than she knows herself; a young adventurer supports her travels by smuggling pre-Columbian artifacts; a triple homicide devastates a high school swim team; a detective searches for the truth in a he-said-she-said situation. Plus, award-winning journalists investigate the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the unsolved lynching of Claude Neal.

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  I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

  Lee Gutkind and Karen Wolk Feinstein

  This collection of true narratives reflects the dynamism and diversity of nurses, who provide the first vital line of patient care. Here, nurses remember their first “sticks,” first births, and first deaths, and reflect on what gets them through long, demanding shifts, and keeps them in the profession.

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  An Immense New Power to Heal: The Promise of Personalized Medicine

  Lee Gutkind and Pagan Kennedy

  There is no denying that new technology, which has triggered an explosion of scientific information, is ushering in a revolution in medicine. Through intimate patient stories as well as profiles of leading-edge doctors and scientists, this clear-eyed, lively, and highly engaging book explores one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of our time: the sequencing of the human genome and the subsequent development of personalized medicine.

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  At the End of Life: True Stories About How We Die

  Lee Gutkind and Francine Prose

  What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

  The modern healthcare system has become proficient at staving off death with aggressive interventions. And yet, eventually everyone dies—and although most Americans say they would prefer to die peacefully at home, more than half of all deaths take place in hospitals or health care facilities. At the End of Life tackles this conundrum head on. These twenty-two compelling personal-medical narratives explore death, dying and palliative care, and reveal the inner workings of a system in which doctors, patients and their loved ones battle to hang on—and to let go.

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  Silence Kills: Speaking Out and Saving Lives

  Lee Gutkind, Karen Wolk Feinstein, and Abraham Verghese

  These stories explore a wide and complicated range of experiences—a doctor is pressured into sending a patient home from the emergency room but later must face his decision when the patient suddenly dies; a physician deals with the doubt brought on by a malpractice lawsuit and must come to terms with the fact that even doctors are fallible and human; a woman fights for her mother’s mental health against a system eager to over-medicate the elderly; and more—but all share one thing: a frustration with a system that hinders communication and often leads to unnecessary suffering. (Southern Methodist University Press, 2007)