The true history of the Elephant Man

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Gladys Clark Farmer

Documents the life of a Mormon girl in Utah who developed neurofibromatosis at the age of fifteen, and in the six years until her death exhibited great courage, determination, and faith.

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Clarence G. Lasby

Previous Eisenhower biographers have touched on his heart condition, but Clarence Lasby is the first to examine the impact of the president's health on the nation. He offers a dramatic revisionist account of the events surrounding the president's 1955 heart attack and subsequent efforts by the president and his staff to minimize its political impact. Drawing on newly opened medical records and personal papers of Eisenhower's physicians, Lasby challenges virtually everything we have believed about the president's heart attack. Most disturbingly, he has discovered that the president's personal physician, Dr. Howard Snyder, misdiagnosed the attack as a gastrointestinal problem and waited ten hours before sending Eisenhower to the hospital. Lasby also sets the record straight on how the president and his aides "managed" the public's understanding of events, and he offers evidence that Eisenhower, Dr. Snyder, and press secretary James Hagerty withheld and recast information to serve the president's political priorities. Equally important, Lasby's book offers a touching portrait of a proud man faced with a debilitating disease. It examines Ike's private struggle to lead a full life despite his condition and analyzes his decision to seek a second term even against the advice of cardiologist Paul Dudley White. It also shows how a man who had always carefully joked after his health now became obsessed with it.

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Amy Hoffman

Hospital Time is a memoir about friendship, family, and caregiving in the age of AIDS. Amy Hoffman, a writer, lesbian activist, and former editor of Gay Community News, chronicles with fury and unflinching honesty her experience serving as primary caretaker for her friend and colleague, Mike Riegle, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Hoffman neither idealizes nor deifies Riegle, whom she portrays as a brilliant man, devoted prison rights activist, and very difficult friend.

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Margy Dieguez

"The year was 1952 ... and in one moment that summer my life was changed forever. A dreaded virus was running rampant throughout the United States. Technically called infantile paralysis, this virus was more commonly known as polio. There had been sixty thousand documented cases and three thousand deaths that year, the last big epidemic before Dr. Jonas Salk discovered his vaccine. At fifteen years old I was diagnosed with this disease that the entire United States feared. My story is one of finding a way to overcome everyday problems posing monumental obstacles. After forty days in an iron lung; in an isolation ward for five months and eight months of rehabilitation, and being unable to use my arms and legs normally I had many challenges. Learning to walk again I married and had children but soon I was alone raising a six year old son and two year old daughter. It is my belief that my life has been what it was supposed to be. I believe I have lived life to the fullest and for that I am forever grateful for all the amazing people who helped me along the way and the amazing God who made it all possible Courage The measure of one's courage should not be judged alone by how tall a mountain is but also by how tall was the mountain to the one who climbed it."--Back cover.