The enjoyment of reading books is celebrated on World Book Day on April 23. It is a day to celebrate the privilege of being able to read. This article includes summaries of books I recently read.

I was a good reader and read many books during my school and college days. During medical school and afterward, I had to focus mainly on medical/study books and only got a little time to read other books. When my son and daughter were in elementary school, we made a rule to encourage them to read. They had to read a book, tell the summary as proof, and get one dollar per book. It worked and they both became avid readers. ❤❤

Recently, my daughter and I listened to many good audiobooks. I have been using my driving time to listen to books. This article summarizes books I liked. I am sharing it for book lovers!

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When Breath Becomes Air is an autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was published on January 12, 2016. At the age of 36, during the residency training in neurosurgery at Stanford University, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. He died in March 2015, while working on this book. After graduating from Yale, he got married to Lucy Goddard and they have a daughter together. When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is about Henrietta Lacks and the immortal cell line, known as HeLa, that came from Lacks’s cervical cancer cells in 1951. It is based on the true story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer, whose cells were taken without her knowledge, which became one of the most important tools in medicine, including developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Lacks was never recognized or compensated for the use of her cells. Lacks ultimately passed away on October 4, 1951, at the age of 31, her cells continue to impact the world. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, are still alive today. The book was published on February 2, 2010.

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Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness is a New York Times best-selling autobiography by New York Post writer Susannah Cahalan. It was published on November 13, 2012. Twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan was diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and she tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen. Cahalan was fortunate to be correctly diagnosed because only 10 percent of people with the disease were properly diagnosed at that time. Since then, a better understanding of the disease and its symptoms has resulted in more frequent diagnosis and treatment.

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Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital is a 2013 book by the American journalist Sheri Fink. The book details the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, USA during August 28 – September 1, 2005. Memorial’s emergency plans proved inadequate as the hospital lost power, the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients to last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths (euthanasia, the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease). A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.

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Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets– In the late 1930s, in asylums and hospitals across America, a group of renowned neurosurgeons embarked on a campaign to develop a new class of brain operation—the lobotomy—that they hoped would eradicate everything from schizophrenia to homosexuality. These “psychosurgeons,” as they called themselves, ended up subjecting people to the types of surgical experiments once limited to chimpanzees. In 1953, neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville performed a groundbreaking operation on a 27-year-old epileptic patient named Henry Molaison. The operation failed to eliminate Molaison’s intractable seizures, but it left Henry profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. The story of Patient H.M., is the story of how we came to understand memory, and better understand ourselves.

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup- It is a book by journalist John Carreyrou, released on May 21, 2018. It is the gripping story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos—one of the biggest corporate frauds in history of Silicon Valley. In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs, a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. By early 2017, the company’s value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors.

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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End– is a 2014 non-fiction book by American surgeon Atul Gawande. The book addresses end-of-life care and hospice care, and also contains Gawande’s reflections and personal stories.

Being Mortal is a meditation on how people can better live with age-related frailty, serious illness, and approaching death. Gawande calls for a change in the way that medical professionals treat patients approaching their ends. He suggests that medical care should focus on well-being rather than survival.

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Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family– It is the true story of an American family created by Don and Mimi Galvin (ten boys and two girls), six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science’s great hope in the quest to understand the disease. It is written by Robert Kolker and was published on April 7, 2020. What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease. The samples of their DNA formed the cornerstone of research for the disease in the mid-1900s.

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Love & Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs– was written in 2004 by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs. The book was a national bestseller. Based on over three decades of counseling, as well as scientific and biblical research, Dr. Eggerichs and his wife, Sarah, have taken the Love & Respect message across America and are changing the way couples talk to, think about, and treat each other. The book is built upon the theory that the “primary emotional needs” for men and women, respectively are that men need respect and women need love.

Wives are made to love, want to love and expect love. Husbands are made to be respected, want respect, and expect respect. When a husband feels disrespected, it is especially hard to love his wife. When a wife feels unloved, it is especially hard to respect her husband. Often, we focus on our own needs and simply overlook the needs of the other person.

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Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity– This book is published on April 5, 2022. Author, Dr. Devon Price shares his personal experience with masking, social science research, prescriptions, and personal profiles to tell a story of neurodivergence. Masking is a common coping mechanism in which Autistic people hide their identifiable Autistic traits in order to fit in with societal norms, adopting a superficial personality at the expense of their mental health. Most masked Autistic individuals struggle for decades before discovering who they truly are. Dr. Price lays the groundwork for unmasking and offers exercises that encourage self-expression. It is time to honor the needs, diversity, and unique strengths of Autistic people so that they no longer have to mask. It is time for greater public acceptance and accommodation of differences.

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: First published in 1989. It is a business and self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey. When Stephen Covey first released it, the book became an instant rage because people suddenly got up and took notice that their lives were headed off in the wrong direction; and more than that, they realized that there were so many simple things they could do in order to navigate their life correctly. This book was wonderful education for people, education in how to live life effectively and get closer to the ideal of being a ‘success’ in life. If you implement it, there should be no aspect of your life that should go untouched. The only thing is that you have to understand these ideals and try to implement them in your life. But not everyone understands Stephen Covey’s model fully well, or maybe there are some people who haven’t read it yet.

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The Silent Reformer (देह झाला चंदनाचा)

English translation of best-selling Marathi biographical novel on the life of Revered Pandurang Shastri Athavale, founder of Swadhyay Parivar, who introduced universal way of life, way of worship and way of thinking to achieve spiritual height. Pandurang Shastri (Dadaji) was an activist philosopher who formed the family (parwar) of millions of Swadhayees World-wide. He was recipient of 100s of awards including Magsaysay award, Templeton Award, Gandhi award, Tilak award etc. This novel is entirely based on his life, thoughts and work. Mr. Kher had personal interviews with Dada ji and then he wrote this novel. Hence, this book presents firsthand information about Dada ji and has become historical document of Rev. Pandurang Shastri’s life and work.

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Peace, Love And Healing: The Path to Self-healing. This book explains how to give your body healing messages through the use of meditation, visualization and relaxation. Dr Siegel shows us how emotions such as love, hope, joy and peace of mind have strong physiological effects on each of us, as do depression and dispair. Peace, Love and Healing teaches us to be receptive to the messages our mind gives our body through dreams and symbols, and how to view illness as a ‘reset button’ enabling us to redirect our lives.

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Women in White Coats: The story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care. Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges–creating for the first time medical care for women by women.

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The Gene is the story of an author, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity – and a vision of both humanity’s past and future. The story of the gene begins in 1856. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds – from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes.

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Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ–

Everyone knows that high IQ is no guarantee of success, happiness, or virtue, but until Emotional Intelligence, we could only guess why. Daniel Goleman’s brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our “two minds”—the rational and the emotional—and how they together shape our destiny. Goleman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors, which include self-awareness, self-discipline, and empathy, add up to a different way of being smart—and they aren’t fixed at birth. Although shaped by childhood experiences, emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened throughout our adulthood.

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Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance– Atul Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable. Gawande’s gripping stories of diligence, ingenuity, and what it means to do right by people take us to battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, to labor and delivery rooms in Boston, to a polio outbreak in India, and to malpractice courtrooms around the country. He discusses the ethical dilemmas of doctors participation in lethal injections, examines the influence of money on modern medicine, and recounts the astoundingly contentious history of hand washing.

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The Mind-Body Stress Reset: In this practical and accessible guide, you’ll find powerful and effective tools for calming stress in both mind and body. Based on the innovative Mind-Body Reset (MBR) program, you’ll learn how to stop stress in its tracks with simple somatic exercises. You’ll also discover how you can “reset” your nervous system, alleviate stress flare-ups, and boost your overall health and happiness. 

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Sisters of Mokama is a book by Jyoti Thottam about six Kentucky nuns who built a hospital in India in 1947.  The nuns were from the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. They traveled to Mokama, India at the end of World War II.  The book describes the end of World War II and India’s independence movement. It also shows the first 20 years of post-Partition India through the eyes of American and Indian women.