Development Sociology

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. Featuring 22 compelling personal-medical narratives, the collection explores death, dying, and palliative care, and highlights current features, flaws, and advances in the healthcare system.

Preparing to Die is for anyone interested in learning how to prepare for death from a Buddhist perspective, both spiritually and practically. It is also for those who want to learn how to help someone else who is dying, both during the time of illness and death as well as after death.

In prospective, long-term research with over 700 couples, Gottman has discovered certain factors that distinguish happy, stable couples from both unstable, ultimately divorcing couples and stable but unhappy couples. These findings, which are explained here in understandable, nontechnical language, form the basis of his Sound Marital House theory of marriage, which guides the new therapy. This therapy has two goals: changing the marital friendship and teaching couples to regulate conflict.

In this sensitive and lucid account, Pauline Boss explains that, all too often, those confronted with ambiguous loss fluctuate between hope and hopelessness. Suffered too long, these emotions can deaden feeling and make it impossible for people to move on with their lives. Yet the central message of this book is that they can move on. Drawing on her research and clinical experience, Boss suggests strategies that can cushion the pain and help families come to terms with their grief.

Helping widows and widowers learn how to cope with the grief of losing their helpmate, their lover, and perhaps their financial provider, this guide reveals how to find continued meaning in life when doing so seems difficult. Bereaved spouses will find advice on when and how to dispose of their mate's belongings, dealing with their children, and redefining their role with friends and family.

Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place.

The first book that explains how to open to the immensity of living with death—and how participating fully in life is the perfect preparation for whatever may come next. In Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, the Levines provide calm compassion rather than the frightening melodrama of death. A meaningful insight how to participate fully in life as the perfect preparation for whatever may come next, be it sorrow or joy, loss or gain, death or a new wonderment at life.

When first published in 2001, it divided female critics and readers. One famous columnist wrote a piece demanding that Cusk's children were taken into care, that was she was unfit to look after them. Oprah Winfrey invited her on the show to defend herself and the book as protests grew about its honest, gritty account of the misery of those early months. It is a seminal, stand-out book on the complications of being an ambivalent mum in an age of white-washed, Annabel Karmel'd new families.

Based partly on the author's experience, partly on her in-depth interviews, and partly on a questionnaire she developed with psychologist Holly Barrett to which almost 600 women responded, Father Loss provides the clearest portrait yet of a very special group of women. As a group, they express their insecurities ("Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be able to love a man totally...because that would mean I didn't love my father anymore." - Leslie).

Wendy Mitchell doesn’t fear anything anymore. After her diagnosis of young-onset dementia in 2014, all of Wendy’s old fears melted away. What more was there to be afraid of when she faced her worst fear: losing her own mind? While living with her diagnosis and facing the extreme changes that come along with a terminal illness, Wendy wrote two Sunday Times-bestselling books, went skydiving for the first time and supports multiple dementia advocacy groups in the UK. She is known for talking about living with dementia, but now – while she is still able to – she explores dying with it.

From the National Book Award–winning author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression comes a monumental new work, a decade in the writing, about family. In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so. Solomon’s startling proposition is that diversity is what unites us all.

Women who opt not to be mothers are frequently warned that they will regret their decision later in life, yet we rarely talk about the possibility that the opposite might also be true - that women who have children might regret it. Drawing on years of research interviewing women from a variety of socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds, sociologist Orna Donath treats regret as a feminist issue: as regret marks the road not taken, we need to consider whether alternative paths for women currently are blocked off.

In Talk, Harvard professor Alison Wood Brooks shows how simple changes in how we communicate can enhance our relationships, our performance at work and our lives; who we talk to affects our happiness; and how to talk across differences. Her original research, based on thousands of conversations from sales calls to speed dating, provides fascinating insights.

Patpong, in the heart of Bangkok, teems with bars and sex shows, catering mainly to farangs - foreigners. Cleo Odzer, a young anthropologist, spent three years studying the area. Gaining the confidence of the bar girls and bar boys, she interviewed them at length, lived among them, accompanied several back to their families in remote villages. She also got to know their customers, those in for a night or in forever (many fell in love and stayed on in Patpong). From Odzer's account emerges a far different picture from the cliched image of the prostitute.

In this groundbreaking audiobook, DeVon Franklin dishes the real Truth About Men by making the compelling case that men aren’t dogs, but all men share the same struggle. He uses the metaphor of a dog that needs training as a way to explore why behaviour persists in men that can lead them to act against their vows, their integrity and even their character. DeVon provides the manual for how men can change, both on a personal and a societal level, by providing practical solutions for helping men learn how to resist temptation, how to practice self-control and how to love.

Zoë Colville spent years in a fancy hair salon with a long list of clients, living on cigarettes, croissants, and a shoestring. It was everything she'd ever wanted. But when an unexpected and overwhelming loss caused her life to shift unexpectedly, she found herself on a different path. One where the only use for a hairdryer is warming new-born lambs; where the cycle of life on a farm gives new meaning on purpose, and where nature is both a strict teacher and a balm to soothe the pressures of everyday life.

What is the secret of happy relationships? How do companies build collaborative cultures? What lies behind some of the greatest scientific and creative breakthroughs? The surprising answer is: conflict. Whether it's at work, at home or in public, confronting our differences is the only way to make the most out of them. How to Disagree is about how to do that successfully.

Die Wise does not offer seven steps for coping with death. It does not suggest ways to make dying easier. It pours no honey to make the medicine go down. Instead, with lyrical prose, deep wisdom, and stories from his two decades of working with dying people and their families, Stephen Jenkinson places death at the center of the discussion and asks us to behold it in all its painful beauty. Die Wise teaches the skills of dying, skills that have to be learned in the course of living deeply and well.

What happens when your partner, your primary person, in an instant, becomes a source of danger and pain? The Betrayal Bind introduces new language, concepts, and imagery to explore the crucial relational dilemma that betrayed partners face when their significant other is unsafe to connect to, yet connection is the key to healing.

Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer - but we’re almost always wrong. That’s important, because if we’re wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about. Happily, the real source of great performance is no longer a mystery. Bringing together extensive scientific research, best-selling author Geoff Colvin shows where we go wrong and what actually makes world-class performers so remarkable.