immigrant – watercress words by Dr Aletha

Every year I find more and more book lists; best books, most popular, best selling, books recommended by a celebrity or other famous person, etc. I can’t possibly read them all, but some of them sound so interesting I wish I could.

In this post I’m listing some books from these lists, all medical/health related books, which I tend to interpret loosely.

If you read one and like it, send me a brief note about it and I’ll share with my other readers.

(These are affiliate links to sites where you can buy something, and send a commission to this blog, to pay expenses and to donate to health related causes throughout the world.)

Here is one book I read recently

The NOTE THROUGH the WIRE

In this true love story that defies all odds, Josefine Lobnik, a Yugoslav partisan heroine, and Bruce Murray, a New Zealand soldier, discover love in the midst of a brutal war.

In the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe, two people meet fleetingly in a chance encounter. One an underground resistance fighter, a bold young woman determined to vanquish the enemy occupiers; the other a prisoner of war, a man longing to escape the confines of the camp so he can battle again. A crumpled note passes between these two strangers, slipped through the wire of the compound, and sets them on a course that will change their lives forever.

Woven through their tales of great bravery, daring escapes, betrayal, torture, and retaliation is their remarkable love story that survived against all odds. This is an extraordinary account of two ordinary people who found love during the unimaginable hardships of Hitler’s barbaric regime as told by their son-in-law Doug Gold, who decided to tell their story from the moment he heard about their remarkable tale of bravery, resilience, and resistance.

Thise is a book I read last year. Although published in 2020, the author wrote it in 2019, not realizing how timely it would be.

The Orphan Collector

A Heroic Novel of Survival During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

In this well researched novel about the influenza pandemic of 100 years ago, Ms. Wiseman takes us into the heartbreak of the thousands of children orphaned by both the pandemic and the world war.

I started reading the book late in the year, by the time the COVID-19 cases and deaths were surging in number. I thought about all the people being left orphaned now, although they are not all children. Some are middle-aged adults losing their elderly parents, while others are older adults losing their young adult children.

(As of January 25, 2021, in the United States 25 million persons have been infected with COVID-19, and 420,000 have died.)

Whatever one’s age, losing loved ones to an out of control disease is heartbreaking. The Orphan Collector does not have a fairytale “happy ending”. But the main character Pia, a 12 year old immigrant girl in Philadelphia, learns an ending different than one hoped for can be satisfying in unexpected ways.

Best Books from Amazon

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Listen to an excerpt at the link.

Best Books from People Magazine

Hidden Valley Road

Inside the Mind of an American Family

Hamnet

Penny who blogs at grownchildren.net wrote this about Hamnet

The author paints a detailed portrait of Shakespeare’s wife as an herbalist; …he grows and culls her herbs for various ailments and dispenses them as a pharmacist today would do.

But the story is about grief and how the Shakespeares, man and wife, separately worked their way through the immense loss of their son. The portrait of her grief–we don’t learn much about his–is thrilling in its sensitivity. You don’t have to be in the medical or health field to be fascinated by this book.

What Are You Going Through

Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir

New from Tyndale

The Anxiety Reset

A Life-Changing Approach to Overcoming Fear, Stress, Worry, Panic Attacks, OCD and More

exploring the HEART of health in literature

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