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This brutally honest memoir takes you through one man's struggle to deal with his daughter's severe mental problems. It's not easy subject material, but Greenberg strikes a wonderful balance between factual reporting and emotional responding. He presents us with his truth—deep, unsettling, and ambiguous but altogether enlightening. —Nici Smith

NurtureShock is a provocative collection of essays popularizing recent research that challenges conventional wisdom about raising children. An award-winning article, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids,” which advised parents that telling children they are smart is counterproductive, prompted journalists Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) and Merryman to dig further into the science of child development. Here they ably explore a range of subjects of interest to parents and call attention to what they see as two basic errors in thinking about children: that things work in children the same way they work in adults and that positive traits necessarily oppose and ward off negative behavior.

Kay Redfield Jamison—who recounted her battle with harrowing mental illness in her bestselling memoir, An Unquiet Mind—has written an exquisite, haunting meditation on mortality, grief, and loss. In Nothing Was the Same, Jamison looks back at her twenty-year relationship with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a renowned scientist who battled debilitating dyslexia to become one of the foremost experts on schizophrenia. With honesty, candor, wit, and simplicity, she describes his death, her own long, difficult struggle with grief, and her efforts to distinguish grief from depression. “A soul-baring love letter to the author's loving life partner,” writes Kirkus Reviews.

“At 44, Melanie Gideon looked at the various roles she'd assumed as the younger twin in a family of four girls, wife of a loving husband and stay-at-home mother of a sweet nine-year-old boy, and found herself guiltily asking, ‘Is this all there is?’ The author's memoir, a hilariously probing account of personal growth and stasis, is Gideon's answer to that existential query. Refreshing and sassy, with more than a dash of tenderness thrown in,” writes Kirkus Reviews.