Health, Medicine and Wellness
 | Mia Birk
Author, Visionary, Sustainable Transportation Pioneer
Urban planner and bicycling and pedestrian transportation advocate Mia Birk used a shoestring budget to help turn Portland, Oregon into America’s #1 cycling city. She documents the crusade to integrate bicycling into daily life in her book Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet. With over 20 years of experience with pedestrian, bicycle, trail, and greenway planning design and implementation, Birk’s message is the educated, can-do antidote to the doom-and-gloom that often seems a staple of the debate over our planet’s environmental dilemmas. Mia Birk is Chief Executive Officer and Principal at the international firm Alta Planning and Design and an Adjunct Professor at Portland State University.
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 | Elizabeth Gilbert
Bestselling Author │ Short Story Writer │ Memoirist
Annie Proulx has called her “a writer of incandescent talent.” The author of 2006's runaway bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert is unquestionably one of her generation's most beloved memoirists. Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, is Gilbert's memoir of soul-searching and international exploration in the wake of her devastating divorce. Gilbert is a distinguished journalist who began her career writing for Harper's Bazaar, Spin, the New York Times Magazine, and GQ. In 2002, her book The Last American Man was a Finalist for the National Book Award. Committed, the deeply satisfying follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love, tells the story of Gilbert's unexpected plunge into second marriage—this time to Felipe, the man with whom she falls in love at the end of Eat, Pray, Love. Part memoir, part meditation on marriage as a sociohistorical institution, Committed is rich with Gilbert's bright, engaging voice and characteristic playful humor. Gilbert recently finished a novel, The Signature of All Things, to be published in the fall of 2013.
Selected Books: The Last American Man, Eat Pray Love, Committed
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 | Tracy Kidder
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Essayist
Kidder’s exceptional and prolific writing career took off in 1983 with The Soul of a New Machine, a book celebrated for its insight into the world of high-tech corporate America that earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Other bestselling works include House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, and Home Town. Regarded as a master of nonfiction narrative, Kidder has enjoyed enormous success with Mountains Beyond Mountains and Strength in What Remains, which have been extremely popular with campus and community Common Read programs. Mountains tells the story of charismatic humanitarian Dr. Paul Farmer and his efforts to address the global health crises of AIDS and TB. Strength chronicles the tale of a young medical student, Deo, who survives the genocide in Burundi and emigrates to the U.S. to find redemption through education and service to others. Both books have been enormously popular First Year Experience/Common Read selections and are masterful accounts of real people who have prevailed against seemingly impossible circumstances to better our world. Tracy Kidder’s writing has appeared in numerous periodicals over the years, including the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Granta, and the New York Times. His newest book, Good Prose, is a guide to the craft of nonfiction, written with his long-time editor Richard Todd.
Selected Books: Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Strength in What Remains, The Soul of a New Machine
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 | Dr. Peter Kramer, MD
Bestselling Author │ Psychiatrist │ Novelist
Described by the New York Times as “possibly the best known psychiatrist in America,” Dr. Kramer is a widely sought-after expert on the human mind, brain, and behavior. In addition to his bestselling books Against Depression and Listening to Prozac, he is known for his several years as host of The Infinite Mind, an award-winning radio show that aired on more than 200 public radio stations across the U.S. and Canada. With drama, wit, and a breadth of learning that extends from Freud to neurobiology to the novels of Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf, Dr. Kramer allows us to see how psychiatry—that mystifying amalgam of science, art and simple empathy—works. His latest book is Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. He has appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, Fresh Air, and Oprah. He has written extensively for the popular press, most notably for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, and U.S. News & World Report, in addition to his regular column in Psychiatric Times. Kramer has an MD from Harvard University and is a professor at Brown University. He is currently at work on a new book.
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 | Rebecca Skloot
Bestselling Author │ Journalist
Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot spent over ten years doggedly uncovering the truth about the life, death and ultimate "immortality" of a poor black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks. On a tumultuous educational path until a community college biology instructor utter the words "Henrietta Lacks," Skloot—with remarkable focus and tenacity—set off on a trajectory that would shine the national spotlight on both and become the phenomenal book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
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Dr.
Geoff Tabin, MD | Norah Vincent
Bestselling Author │ Cultural Critic │ Journalist
Called “the new Steinem” by William Safire, Norah Vincent took a leave from writing her nationally syndicated political opinion columns in order to write her New York Times bestseller Self-Made Man, the story of a woman living, working, and dating in drag as a man. Narrating her journey with exquisite insight, empathy, and humor, Vincent ponders the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as she explores firsthand who men really are when women aren’t around. Her next work of nonfiction,Voluntary Madness, is a riveting work that exposes the state of mental healthcare in America from the inside out. Vincent’s newest book, a searing novel entitled Thy Neighbor was published in fall 2012.
Selected Books: Self-Made Man, Voluntary Madness, Thy Neighbor
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