Showing results by publisher "Macmillan Digital Audio" in Health & Wellness

How to Survive a Plague by David France is the riveting, powerful and profoundly moving story of the AIDS epidemic and the grass-roots movement of activists, many of them facing their own life-or-death struggles, who grabbed the reins of scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease.

In Uncle Tungsten, Oliver Sacks evokes, with warmth and wit, his upbringing in wartime England. He tells of the large science-steeped family who fostered his early fascination with chemistry. There follow his years at boarding school where, though unhappy, he developed the intellectual curiosity that would shape his later life. And we hear of his return to London, an emotionally bereft 10-year-old who found solace in his passion for learning. Uncle Tungsten radiates all the delight and wonder of a boy’s adventures and is an unforgettable portrait of an extraordinary young mind.

Imaginative and insightful, Seeing Voices offers a way into a world that is, for many people, alien and unfamiliar - for to be profoundly deaf is not just to live in a world of silence but also to live in a world where the visual is paramount. In this remarkable book, Oliver Sacks explores the consequences of this, including the different ways in which the deaf and the hearing impaired learn to categorise their respective worlds - and how they convey and communicate those experiences to others.

David DeSteno's Emotional Success is an exploration of harnessing the practical power of using positive emotion to impact decision making. Current models promote suppressing emotion and using willpower as a means of self-control which, DeSteno argues, is not viable in the long term. With comparisons to well-known studies and a balance of hard research and popular culture examples, Emotional Success calls for a paradigm shift in the way in which we talk about the effect of responding emotionally.

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the capacity to recognise faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world - and The Mind’s Eye is testament to the myriad ways that we, as humans, are capable of rising to this challenge.

Philippa Perry's handbook consoles, nourishes and gently leads us on the path to sanity and emotional balance. There is no simple set of instructions that can guarantee sanity, but if you want to overcome emotional difficulties and become happier, psychotherapist Philippa Perry argues that there are four cornerstones to sanity you can influence to bring about change.

Why does paying for things often feel like it causes physical pain? Why does it cost you money to act as your own real estate agent? Why are we comfortable overpaying for something now just because we've overpaid for it before? In Small Change, world renowned economist Dan Ariely answers these intriguing questions and many more as he explains how our irrational behaviour often interferes with our best intentions when it comes to managing our finances.

When Oliver Sacks, a physician by profession, injured his leg while climbing a mountain, he found himself in an unusual position - that of patient. The injury itself was severe but straightforward to fix; the psychological effects, however, were far less easy to predict, explain, or resolve: Sacks experienced paralysis and an inability to perceive his leg as his own, instead seeing it as some kind of alien and inanimate object over which he had no control. A Leg to Stand On is both an account of Sacks’ ordeal and subsequent recovery and an exploration of the ways in which mind and body are inextricably linked.

In March 2017 Linda Nolan was diagnosed with secondary breast cancer and was given the terrible news that it was not curable, though it was treatable. Her first thought was to worry about her family, still grieving the loss of their sister Bernie just a few years earlier. Her second was to think, But I'm alive, and I'm going to fight it.

Hear me out. Does this sound like you? You end a team meeting and can't recall a single thing that was said. You leave a conversation with a friend feeling disconnected and unfulfilled. You think you and your boss are on the same page, only to find out you haven't been meeting expectations. Fortunately, listening, like any communication skill, can be improved - and Ximena Vengoechea can show you how.

In 2008, 20-year-old Jonny Benjamin stood on Waterloo Bridge, about to jump. A stranger saw his distress and stopped to talk with him - a decision that saved Jonny's life. Fast-forward to 2014 and Jonny, together with Rethink Mental Illness, launched a campaign with a short video clip so that Jonny could finally thank that stranger who put him on the path to recovery. More than 319 million people around the world followed the search. ITV's breakfast shows picked up the story until the stranger was found, and the pair reunited and have remained firm friends ever since.

In this eloquent meditation on ageing, Marie de Hennezel guides us through a true ‘art of growing old’. She recalls her encounters as a clinical psychologist with extraordinary people who 'grow old gracefully’ – and through her experience shows us how to make the most of this time in our lives, to avoid depression and to stay happy.

‘Am I normal?’ 'What’s an anxiety disorder?’ 'Does therapy work?' 'How would I know if someone had an eating disorder?' These are just a few of the questions Natasha Devon is asked as she travels the UK campaigning for better mental health awareness and provision. Here, Natasha calls upon experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience and anthropology to debunk and demystify the full spectrum of mental health, from A (Anxiety) to Z (Zero F*cks - the art of high self-esteem) via everything from body image and gender to differentiating 'sadness' from 'depression'.

Mark and Giulia fell for each other in their teens, married in their 20s, and didn't realise what their love would demand of them until Giulia suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break at the age of 27. Hospitalized for almost a month, she was tormented by delusions and paranoia. Upon release, she sunk into an extended suicidal depression during which Mark, struggling to support Giulia, was torn between the demands of keeping her safe and following doctors' orders, and honouring her independence and making her feel loved.

In A Manual for Heartache she describes how she learnt to live with grief and loss and find joy in the world again. She explores how to cope with life at its most difficult and overwhelming and how we can emerge from suffering forever changed but filled with hope. This is a moving, warm and uplifting book that offers solidarity and comfort to anyone going through a painful time, whatever it might be. It's a book that will help to soothe an aching heart and assure its listeners that they're not alone.

When Jean Hannah Edelstein's world overturned, she was forced to confront some of the big questions: how do we cope with grief? How does life change when we realise we're not invincible? Does knowing our likely fate make it harder or easier to face the future? This Really Isn't About You is a book about finding your way in life. Which is to say, it's a book about discovering you are not really in charge of that at all.

Learn to take action and make a difference - one step at a time. How to Change the World combines insights from Tolstoy, Gandhi and Sartre and outlines a refreshing theory of political power, giving examples of successful non-violent action from across the world, from the start of recorded history to the present day.

The modern world can be a dangerous place, filled with fast cars, smartphones, drugs and extreme sports. Meanwhile, we humans are as fragile as ever. In fact after a century of decline in injuries and accidental deaths, they are on the rise again. The question is - why? Steve Casner has devoted his career to studying the psychology of safety, and he knows that there's not a safety warning we won't ignore or a foolproof device we can't turn into an implement of disaster.